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Promoting Coding Grandchildren


Sometimes, this Grandma thinks that technology is moving faster than our society can keep up.  Most of the time, I am surprised at the next best electronic thing that arrives that I did not know I could not live without until I owned it.

Now, it seems, we are out unless we learn the how of “coding.”  I know we depend on those skilled in computer technology.  Now, it seems, that the newest trend is giving children as young as six coding tutoring lessons and teaching them how to create their own computer programs!


New York Magazine, December 9, 2013, had an article, “Coding Kids:  The Latest Language-Learning Trend has Nothing to do With Words,” by Jeff Wise that caught my eye.  It used to be that it was important for our grandchildren to learn sports, music, dance, karate, etc.  Now, it seems it is important for them to learning computer coding.  It is not important enough for them to learn the best apps, now the test is how well they create their own app.  Of course, New York Magazine is telling us how New York City is ahead of the trend.  According to Mr. Wise;


For most people, software programming’s social cachet falls below that of tax preparation. But it’s catching fire among forward-thinking New York parents like Katie’s, who see it as endowing their children both with a strategically valuable skill and a habit for IQ-multiplying intellectual rigor. According to WyzAnt, an online tutoring marketplace, demand for computer-science tutors in New York City has doubled each of the past two years. And if one Silicon Alley-backed initiative pans out, within a decade every public-school kid in the city will have access to coding, up from a couple of thousand. . . .


The couple started Katie and her two brothers on programming when they were 7 or 8. “The goal isn’t necessarily for everyone to become a computer-science engineer, just as when you teach people how to write English, the goal isn’t for everybody to become an author,” says Wenger. “The point is that it’s a very important way of analyzing the world, thinking about the world, interacting with the world, and manipulating the world. It is a fundamental enabling skill that is applicable across the widest imaginable set of domains.”


Similar sentiments can be heard throughout the techopolis. Paul Johnson, a 43-year-old software developer who himself started to learn coding at the age of 6, has told his kindergartner that he can play any computer game he wants so long as he writes it himself; father and son are working on a program together now. “It’s almost a Renaissance education,” Johnson says. “It involves storytelling, it involves art and creativity, it involves rigorous mathematics, and all of this has to work together, so you see directly how they relate to each other.”


“Coding is absolutely a question of literacy,” says Mark Guzdial, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Those who don’t have access to this kind of education are going to be missing a core skill.”


Okay.  “Core skill.”  “Absolutely a question of literacy.”  I immediately forwarded the link to the parents of my grandchildren.   I did not stop there, of course, and forwarded them links to potential computer science tutors in their areas.  They are busy and could not find the time to find computer science tutors.  I went on my go to website,  and researched.  Found some promising ones in one location but not another.  I tried WyzAnt but did not like it as much.  The on line reviews I read are not complimentary either.


My best find in researching was a web entry by a dad and programmer who gave great ideas on parents exposing their children to coding and what is available on the internet.   His article is, “Teaching your Kids How to Write Computer Programs,” by Marshall Brain. Of course, this requires the parents of our grandchildren to have the time and inclination to do this.  This Grandma has found that the grandchildren do better for this sort of thing to be taught by others than their parents. This is one time where I am sorry we are long distance grandparents.  This might be a fun activity to do and learn along with grandchildren if you are a local grandparent.


I have a granddaughter.  The next paragraph by Mr. Wise talks about the importance of getting girls involved and mentioned a website I looked at:


. . . .a former New York City deputy public advocate named Reshma Saujani was wondering what she could do to encourage girls to become programmers. “When it was simply an idea in my head, Twitter came onboard,” she says. The group, Girls Who Code, is now backed by a Who’s Who list of tech giants and aims to reach a million girls by 2020. “When I started Girls Who Code, it was about gender inequality. Now it’s also about economic inequality,” she says. “I think this is the most important issue domestically. It’s frightening. Parents who have money are pushing their kids to learn coding. Kids whose parents don’t have money are being left behind.”


Okay.  Now this Grandma is getting the sense that contributing to payment of tutors for grandchildren to learn coding is something we grandparents should consider.  It seems it might be an investment in their future, equally important to giving gifts of contributing to a college fund:


The economic-utility argument isn’t one that upper-middle-class parents tend to linger on, but it’s a major industry concern. Despite the moribund national jobs market, software positions go begging. By 2020, the industry expects to have a million more positions than it can fill. Nine out of ten U.S. high schools don’t offer computer programming, and fewer than one college student in 40 graduates with a degree in the field. “We have a clear disparity between the needs of industry and the number of computer-science graduates we produce,” said Maria M. Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, in testimony before a Senate committee earlier this month. “We simply do not have enough students graduating high school with an interest in pursuing computer science.”


. . . . Wenger thinks that the shift has already begun, courtesy of The Social Network and the growing roster of twentysomething software billionaires. “The biggest transformation I’ve seen,” he says, “is that coding has gone from something that weird kids do to something the cool kids do.” There’s nothing dorky about huge piles of cash.”


It’s not that this Grandma wants the grandchildren to pursue something they might not like to just make money.  However, if the grandchild is not exposed to coding, how would the grandchild know about coding.  And it could end up being a lucrative future career.  After all, exposure and new experiences is what is important to give a child.  Until this article, this Grandma did not really know what this word coding meant!


Joy,


Mema

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