HOW TO INTRODUCE CODING TO PRESCHOOLERS
Steve Jobs has said that everyone should learn how to program because “it teaches you how to think”. This is one of the reasons why coding for kids has become the next best thing in the modern era. Research has shown that even children from the age of five, can grasp the basic elements of coding and how the systemic thinking procedure in coding can be emulated by children even at a very young age.
As you might know, there are a lot of benefits that children can have if they are exposed to coding from a young age. 21st-century skills such as communication, information literacy, media literacy, technology literacy, and flexibility are all likely outcomes of learning the art of programming. With this in mind, we can talk about a couple of things to keep in mind while we introduce the concept of coding to our children.
Games and Puzzles
Well, the first step towards teaching children the basics of programming… isn’t actually through teaching them programming. The main idea during this period is to help them become intimate with the concept of problem-solving and logical reasoning, these are the two elements that programming is built upon. Puzzles, Legos, and Rubik’s Cubes are some of the tools that you can introduce to your children to help them develop this method of perception. By solving complex puzzles and building towers with legos they learn the process of systemic thinking and how one piece can work as a whole with the other components to form a definite object.
Aside from this, letting children play video games that contribute to germinating their creativity is also a good start in helping them understand the basics of programming and getting familiar with how a computer relays commands and provides an appropriate output. Roblox is a great game that can help to accomplish this aspect of learning. In contrast to most other games, which are generally more centered around a straight account and a solitary, driving story, Roblox is essentially about creativity which includes crafting games and environments.
Roblox is constructed utilizing a coding language called Lua, a specific variant made especially for Roblox players to code inside the Roblox Studio. Just as making through more visual menus, Roblox Studio takes into consideration players to work out and implement their composed lines of code to make and control every object within the game. The coding process in this starts simple, but over time the complexity of the code increases, and eventually, children will be able to write full scripts containing Lua code.
Introduce Them to Programming Languages
Eventually, we have to make them understand how a computer functions and get in touch with how a set of commands work in unison to give out a specific product. For this, an introduction to programming languages is necessary. Children should get to know that a computer also has a specific binary language that only it can understand; and there are a set of programming languages that we can use to help translate what we want the machine to do; to the computer. While a basic introduction to Python or a similar programming language would be sufficient at their age; what they can start testing out and learning with is a programming language called Scratch, which is developed by MIT Media Lab. Scratch is a block-based visual programming language and site focused predominantly on children's instructive devices for coding. Children at the webpage can make projects on the web utilizing a block-like interface.
Scratch, just like Roblox that we mentioned earlier, brings forth a gamified approach to learning to code. But unlike the latter, it is much more of an educational game, rather than a full-blown videogame. Scratch lets children create interactive stories, games, and animations. Why we recommend scratch for preschoolers is because it has a very inviting structure that would resemble the favorite cartoons and games of the children; and because of its learn-through-play approach, children are less likely to get bored during their initial phase of learning the basics of coding.
Find Them a Platform to Learn
There are a lot of resources online that can help children in learning the basic concepts of coding and understanding its fundamentals. YouTube is a great resource, with a lot of channels providing quality videos on the basics of programming. Other than this certain websites are exclusively functioning for teaching kids to code. The benefit of these websites, when compared to YouTube, is that her children can have one-to-one conversations with the teachers and clear their doubts effortlessly. Another advantage is that these websites do their teaching as ‘courses’. This can contribute to providing a structure to children in their progress to learning and this, in turn, makes sure that the children won’t be bombarded with information.
Our primary goal when we look at coding for kids at the preschool level is essential to just cultivate in them a spirit of inquiry and logical reasoning. For this, we can adapt whatever approach that we discussed above, whether it be screen-free ones like building puzzles and legos, or coding courses and video games that children can indulge in during their free time.
Learning to code at this stage of their development has a multitude of benefits that can guide them later through life even if they do not wish to pursue a career in programming later on. The STEM knowledge and the acquired sub-attributes that come as a result of coding can help them go a long way.
