Coding Classes For Your Child- Are You Afraid Your Child Will Fall Behind Others Without It?
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Are you suddenly getting bombarded with all these messages and calls and feeling lost? Are you finding yourself into a fear-of-missing-out mode on hearing that your neighbor Mr. Sharma’s 7 years old daughter won a code-a-thon championship award? If you are getting sleepless nights on this topic, Should I or should I not, or even if you have already enrolled your child in the classes, it would be a good idea to read further on to have the right outlook towards it.
Let’s begin with “What is coding”?
Coding is the method of communicating with a computer. It is done to perform a specific function like creating software program, website or apps (including games or chat bots). It involves learning the syntax, rules and flow of the language computer understands to give instructions accordingly.
Now apply this to the cognitive, physical and behavior developmental aspects of a child. There are three ways to look at it….
- As a language to learn- Quite similar to how a child learns a spoken language to communicate with others.
- As a skill to learn — Building software programs similar to cooking, dancing, making Lego block buildings or painting. Tag line is “Younger the child, Faster is the grasp”.
- Positive effect on building soft skills like problem-solving, creativity or collaboration.
Now firstly if we think from a language point of view, we all know that young children are very good at picking up new languages, so we may wonder — Why not add to their kitty a language that speaks to the computer as well. But we shouldn’t forget that learning a language is a natural social process. Language learning is not just about propping the child in front of a screen and showing videos in that language. It involves communicating with people and learning the underlying culture, humor, diction, pauses, non-verbal part and context, something that is way different from communication between people and a computer.
To understand the process of verbal language development that happens in a very organic way, look at this 3 months old child. She is taking baby steps towards learning to communicate her frustration at not being able to fully explore a toy through her mouth — ALL ON HER OWN!
Further the beauty of a language is the flexibility it provides, you can say:
I want that cookie before drinking milk.
I won’t drink the milk till I get the cookie.
Before drinking the milk I want that cookie.
First cookie please…
Or plain vanilla pointing at the cookie jar while sticking the lower lip out.
All this is missing when we talk about learning a language that computer understands. A few days back I had gone to an ATM machine with my 9 years old daughter. She wanted to activate her card. She patiently followed all the steps to enter details in the ATM machine one by one to activate her card. In the last stage she got the entry of her birthday date in DDMMYYYY format mixed up. The machine gave a sorry emoticon asking her to do the whole process again. When it happened twice, she made faces at the machine. I could only say- Dear this might work with a human being…..not with a machine!! Now put it against my experience in Hong Kong. I wanted to get the direction to a washroom in a mall where the attendant didn’t understand English language. I was in a fix. I began with making some feeble attempts by closing the fist of my right hand and twisting the wrist in the air to show the movements of the flush handle. Getting a quizzical look back, I switched to rubbing my palms, cupping them and moved them up and down in front of my face, trying to make a splashing-water-on-the-face gesture. The person smiled and guided me to the right place. This is real communication at work. So essentially “computer language” is a misnomer. It is actually a skill development.
Coming to the second aspect, skill development, we might draw an analogy with olden times when we were hunters and gatherers. Well a child was being given a bow and an arrow right when he or she was very young even 3–4 years old. When there are all sorts of projections that more and more new jobs are going to be in the field of computing, we may buy in- What is the harm in preparing the child for a job early on– there are potential jobs, well paying jobs. All this is a very good selling rhetoric. Now the sense that is being drilled in is- not teaching a child how to code is like not teaching a child how to read! Coding is becoming so popular because of the fear factor of the parent-Will we miss the train? The question to ask is-Are we still coding in the language that was being used twenty years back? Industry experts say-Every two years our technology is becoming obsolete. So what is it that we are preparing the child for going with-The earlier the better it is! And then we have the whole new angle added to raising a child-How to motivate my child to code!It is a very obtuse view when somebody claims-World only needs computer science engineers.
Picking up the third aspect i..e How coding can help development of other skills that are being marketed right from creativity, problem solving, collaboration and communication and sometimes going as far as entrepreneurship skills, persistence and whole brain development! There is an irony here. To expect that a child starts thinking within the limitedness and rigidity of structure that a coding language offers, and then market it as increasing the child’s creativity, innovativeness and problem solving skills is like Henry Ford’s quote on Ford car’s Model T –Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black!
There are no experimental trials to showcase that developing coding skills in a child results in any other soft skill building as projected by the marketers. There is a commercial and glamour angle here behind pushing coding to your child. We are getting confused when we say coding improves problem solving skills. Think about a problem that a young child faces in real life, say tying laces. The child can learn to tie his laces in “n” number of styles including simply tucking them inside the shoes as the aim is that he doesn’t fall down. However coding only has one way of thinking — like a conditional statement is strictly achieved through: If{} Else{}. So it is a box with limited options. At this age they are trying to make sense of the world around them, trying to absorb more than what they can deliver. At a young age, we want the child to think out of the box, to use a particular stuff in several ways, to make a hat out of kitchen bowls and superman gears out of robes. To put them into a highly structured regime is like robbing them of this free-wheeling thought development.
Are you still wondering if your young child needs coding classes to develop problem solving skills in real life? In fact it is other way around. Coding is supported by computational thinking. If indeed we wish to work towards instilling these qualities we need to understand deeper what goes into being a coder. If you ask a developer he or she would tell you that- Coding is not about making something that works, it is about figuring out why something doesn’t work…..and that is a skill needed to be encouraged in the real world. It starts right from dismantling a toy and fixing it back. Coding is also about developing something that is reusable, clean and structured. Child who has not learned to fold bed sheets, brush teeth every day, can’t pack school bag without an adult’s supervision or can’t handle conflicts with friends…..We want him or her to start learning the structure and discipline of coding, really! Coding is not about merely following steps, it is about doing something well. Every time you involve your child in fixing things in the house, you are teaching coding skills or rather skills beyond writing a code…a skill that would help him or her in nearly any career, in every hobby and in every relationship. Bottom line is let the kids satiate their curiosity in the real world around first.
In fact these skills often get developed naturally. A child faces multiple challenges in a day, right from how to solve 1809 multiplied with 89, how to figure out workings of a pinhole camera to how to make friends outside or convince parents to allow a sleep over with a friend. The only difference is some goals are self created (like making friends or sleepover) and some others are created by others (academics in traditional system). When adults give a freedom to the children to express, emphasize on the process that is being followed instead of focusing on the end result alone and support the children through recognizing the process, they help children to flex and sharpen their computational thinking all the time. Involving them in real world say allowing them to cook, to tinker the toys, to participate in repairs around the house or to help a friend find missing toy are all that facilitate development of collaboration, and creative, innovative and expansive thinking. This is the answer to develop problem solving skills; a simple free, unstructured play does the job. Coding is not the answer if you really want your child to do well in life.
There is another reason why I want you to hold on introducing coding too early to your child. It increases the overall screen time of the child. We are having growing number of 6 years old children or even as young as one and half years old sitting hunched over their mobiles for hours. The challenge is when you try to take it away from the child and insist that the child play with the toy animals…Challenge is when you ask your 14 years old child to come with you for a family get-together and he or she shrugs-
I don’t know anybody there, how am I going to talk to them?
…Well, you didn’t know how to talk to the computer….you have become very good at talking to it….now how about learning to talk to the people!!
Fact of the matter is that the real world takes more persistence. Things in the real world are not fast enough, they are not rewarding enough, they are not responsive enough and they are not animated enough. Compare making seven floored tower of blocks in real versus online world. Ask an eight years old child, how difficult it is to spend an evening in outdoors when there are no friends or there has been a fight with friends and you are left to your own self to entertain. Are these small problems to solve? In fact young children can develop sensory integration challenge or delays in other areas (including verbal or written communication) if they are spending large amount of time on the screens. The crux is the easy access to quick stimulation that being on screen gives, the sense-of-reward rush that it gives is highly addictive, not just for an one and half years old child, but even for a 25 years old adult. There have been multiple studies that show adverse impact on psychological and physiological well being (linking obesity, sense of isolation, effect on attention, focus and sleep) of children that are on the screen for a long time. It is for nothing that creators of technological products like Steve jobs (founder of Apple) or Bill gates (founder of Microsoft) had restrictions on how much screen time that their children grew up with. Further facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shared that he wants both of his children to grow up without access to any technology and instead, spend time reading books of all kinds. More than what coding skills teach, I am more bothered about what it takes away from a child. It is a cost. If the child is coding, he is not exercising, he is not exploring a toy, he is not interacting with other children and he is not holding brush paint.
If you ask me — What is it that children really need during their early childhood? I would say:
An enriched environment with More YES and less NOs and a great deal of work towards solving basic problems in life around interpersonal, frustration tolerance, adaptability, emotional vocabulary and flexibility. If appearing more desirable in the eyes of others during college admissions and jobs with skill set of coding under the belt is your concern, my suggestion is, keep a balanced expectation and go at the speed of the child similar to the development of other skills like Cricket or Bhartnatyam. I would still go for the later for young children as the overall motor, social, tactile and kinesthetic modes of learning are inherent in them giving a richer platform for development. If the child doesn’t show a desire to learn coding at a particular age, let him or her take more time. Let-Oh my child missed today’s coding classes– not be your problem to solve through giving various incentives or punishments. Your child has other areas to conquer before increasing his or her employability in the market.
Not to forget that it is important for children to be alone with their thoughts. It is ok to let children get bored. Don’t overfill the days of your child with activities. Schools, friends, outdoors, eating food, good sleep and family time can’t be sacrificed in a bid to make the child more employable. It may work, it may not work, but the critical years of the child to build the core skills and resilience would go away.
Final nail is the marketing line “Coding helps them to visualize abstract concepts”, really? My question is — Are you expecting to expedite biological growth and maturity of a child? Abstract thinking, logical thinking, self-regulation and self-control are as much a byproduct of biological growth of different parts of the brain including pre-frontal cortex as it is the practice effect. Sometimes people tell us-The older one becomes, the harder it is to learn. Well studies also show, the older we become the more logical we think, so even if the memorization drops with age, logic works better and wrong decisions are made less. We have adults today doing great jobs in technology even when they were not initiated in coding in their childhood.
I don’t say don’t teach them coding, all I say is take it like any other skills like playing a sport or learning music. A good time to get into it is 12 or 13 years of age when they have brought certain control and structure in their life, and increased their self-awareness. We teach music and sports in schools because of the inherent value in music and sports, and not necessarily because we need more professional musicians and sportspeople. In similar vein surgeons don’t learn to do surgery in their childhood. The computer would always listen to you when you say “Open”, but your dog or friend will not. There are more important skills to learn first. So to all those parents who are holding onto their purse string tight and not subscribing to the next upcoming coding classes, here is a big thumbs up, well, keep the problem solving going in the real world like how to ride on a wave board. Rest assured because kids are growing up in a tech-dominated environment, they are going to build tech skills anyways. Slowly coding is already getting including in school curriculum. The new education policy (NEP 2020) has a focus on it as well from 6th grade onwards. As children learn how a car runs powered by battery and circuit, at the same time they would learn and appreciate how a software program works. And to those who have already enrolled their little ones for the classes, keep it on as long as it is fun and controlled but not a career ready signal. Take a deep breath, get some perspective and let your child go outdoors.
You may find the following talk show helpful as well. I was one of the panelist in ETNow channel on this topic- Is Coding A Game Changer or a Fad- on India Development Debate.
References:
https://www.timesnownews.com/business-economy/industry/article/as-coding-for-kids-mania-grips-indian-parents-we-ask-does-your-child-really-need-to-learn-coding/665298
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/parenting/moments/how-does-facebook-owner-mark-zuckerberg-monitor-screen-time-for-his-kids/articleshow/71742380.cms
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/against-teaching-kids-to-code-creativity-problem-solving.html
https://www.goodcall.com/news/teach-kids-to-code-09226/