HOW LEARNING TO PROGRAM BENEFITS CHILDREN

Regardless of what your children want to be or will be when they grow up, learning how to do programming has proven to be beneficial for children for so many different reasons, especially in a world where technology becomes more important and competitiveness gets increasingly high year by year. Many notable figures, whether they are the ones in the field of technology or politics, are becoming huge advocates of teaching programming to children, even when they are relatively young. This is because programming goes far beyond simply being able to develop an executable program, it is also capable of teaching children so many essential skills and lessons that will be more than useful for them and their growth as they grow older. These benefits include:

  1. Computational thinking. This term, which might be unfamiliar to some, refers to someone’s ability to communicate logically and in a structured way. The easiest thing to do is to imagine computational thinking like a step by step tutorial, and this skill is widely used by those who are involved in the field of programming, including but not limited to professional programmers and software engineers. Computational thinking teaches you how to analyse and break down a problem into single steps, which are then resolved efficiently. It is a huge boost to any child’s problem-solving skill.
  2. It goes without saying that programming is capable of doing wonders to the sense of creativity of any child. There are so many different ideas that could be implemented through programming, and it also encourages children to think out of the box in so many different ways. This is especially true when they encounter certain problems in their programming, which often requires a little creative thinking to be resolved.
  3. Attention to details. It is no secret that programming requires close attention to details, as a single mistyped line could easily make a program fail to function. Teaching programming to children at a young age could help them learn to see beyond the big picture and into a finer details of anything, and being able to do so will help them go far in life as this particular skill is one that is incredibly important no matter what you are doing for a living.
  4. Trial and error. No matter how good you are at programming, it is near impossible to create a finished product from start to finish without a single flaw, which is why the process called debugging existed in the first place. Many new inventions and programs are created everyday through the process of trial and error, and learning how to program also allows kids to explore their ability and themselves through this process. To see a good end result that meets their own satisfaction, they often need to go through a process of trial and error, and being able to use the end result of a program they created by themselves through this process will give them a huge boost of confidence and pride.