Learning to code is an important skill now we’re living in a digital age. It’s not just enough for you to know how to use technology. Youshould know how it works and how to build it too.
Learning to code doesn’t just mean you can become a developer - it strengthens problem solving and logical thinking skills, and is useful for a range of other disciplines, careers and hobbies. |
why learn code?
- When we got language, we didn’t just learn how to listen, but how to speak. When we got text, we didn’t just learn how to read, but how to write. Now that we have computers, we’re learning how to use them — but not how to program them.
- Programming a computer is not like being the mechanic of an automobile. We’re not looking at the difference between a mechanic and a driver, but between a driver and a passenger. If you don’t know how to drive the car, you are forever dependent on your driver to take you where you want to go. You’re even dependent on that driver to tell you when a place exists.
- Not knowing how our digital environments are constructed leads us to accept them at face value. For example, kids think the function of Facebook is to help them keep in touch with friends. Even a bit of digital literacy helps us see that Facebook users are not its customers, but its product.
- “Computer class” can’t be about teaching kids to use today’s software; it must be about teaching kids to make tomorrow’s software.
- We are putting in place a layer of technology, culture, and economics that we’d darn well better do consciously. The technology we build today is the operating system of the society of tomorrow. Right now, painfully few are participating in this — and usually the choices are made by the highest bidder.
- Computer Science is not just a STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — subject, but a liberal art as well. Being able to think critically about digital media environments means being able to think critically about our world.
- Kids are already doing algorithms, the basic building blocks of computer programming. Once they learn long division, they are ready to start programming.
- The resources are out there: Codecademy.com is just one of many free tools (including CSUnplugged.org and Scratch.org) that any teacher can pick up and implement — if he or she can muster the autonomy to do so. It may just happen that computer education, like the Internet itself, will depend on distributed authority and the bottom-up, enterprising nature of human beings working together.
Taken from Douglas Rushkoff's Blog: http://www.rushkoff.com/cnn-what-im-telling-congress-on-wednesday-teach-kids-code/