Want your kids to be the next tech rockstar? Like with any future athlete or musician you better start early. Here are our developer Matt’s top five reasons why you need to teach your kids to code.
1) Coding Makes You A Wizard.
The ability to program is nothing special if you write software for a living, but in any other industry it gives you magical powers. I’ve seen people spend days manually matching records between two spreadsheets or renaming thousands of files one by one.
They don’t a degree in computer science, but ensuring your kids know they can type something like this into the console.
for file in *.doc
do
mv "$file" "${file/_april.doc/_may.doc}"
done
Instead of spending the next two hours renaming all the reports from April to May. Having the ability to code will make sure they spend their time focused on moving up the career ladder by using their magical powers of automation and common sense to remove medial tasks, innovate and concentrate on the more important parts of their job.
2) Programming > Latin
For generations Latin was used to teach
creativity, problem
solving and analytical skills by teaching kids to translate one set of symbols to another, while preserving their meaning
and structure. Programming follows the same principles, translating
real world problems into models and symbols a machine can understand and
follow.
When programming you learn how to analyse large problems, break them into smaller achievable chunks and then execute a series of logical steps to build up a solution. There are no right or wrong solutions, just some that work better then others (Bubble sort vs Quick Sort). Being able to quickly arrive at an acceptable solution, given the constraints of different problems is a skill valued in any career. There is a reason why so many industries poach engineering graduates.
3) Learning Has Never Been Easier
I’ve heard horror stories from dark ages when programming was done with punch cards and you had to walk up hill through snow both ways to get time on a terminal.
The next generations of programmers have it easy, sites like Code Academy offer free interactive on-line courses with development environments and learning resources built into the browser. No need to go and buy an expensive textbook, download then install a compiler then learn half a dozen console commands just to print ‘hello world’ .
If you feel Javascript is too complicated for children (Which it is) there are graphical languages designed for the sole purpose of teaching children the principles of programming by arranging coloured blocks instead of typing keywords. Like scratch, developed by MIT.
4) Opportunities
Right now the tech scene is hot and I can’t see it cooling down any time soon. Software Engineering and Computer Science students are in demand, I can’t name a single undergraduate student in my degree who did not have paid intern ships thrown at them last summer.
Technology has turned from a vertical niche into a horizontal stretching across all industries. Every business relies on software to automate their sales, data processing, customer acquisition or analytic’s Understanding how these systems work is essential to being able to use them effectively. Even if your kids never end up extending their companies analytic’s platform, being able to speak the language of the engineers who do will make the process much smoother.
5) It’s Heaps Of Fun
Programming is an extremely creative, gratifying and rewarding experience. In the beginning each new keyword you lean unlocks a new world of possibilities, progressing from conditional logic to loops then onto functions and objects.
Then when you think you know it all and have written a few small programs you run into a whole new set of challenges. Where you need to learn how to use frameworks, design patterns and architectures to write bigger and more practical programs.
Once you’ve mastered these tools the world begins to opens up, there are still thousands of frameworks, platforms, languages and domains to master.
While this level of continuous learning and exploration may not appeal to everyone. I guarantee your kids will never come home from the office and complain about sitting at there desk all day pushing paper back and forth.
So, at what age will you start teaching your kids to program?
Matthew Betts | Co-founder and Software Engineer | Questo