Fantastic post…

Teach our kids to code | John Graham-Cumming: “There’s a very worthy petition entitled Teach our kids to code on the DirectGov web site. It’s asking that children be taught to program starting in Year 5 (that’s children roughly 9 or 10 years old). I fully support that idea because I think that ‘programming thinking’ is an important skill that needs to be taught. Children first need to learn to be literate, then they need to learn to be numerate and finally they need to learn to be ‘algorithmate’ (yes, I just made that word up).”

I’m pushing hard for us to work on similar literacies here at Carolina Day. Learning to read, produce and understand code languages goes way beyond writing fun apps or understanding Minecraft on a different level.

Understanding code opens up the young brain to abstract problem solving and algorithmic thinking opportunities that are not consistently developed in our current k-12 (and beyond) educational model. Reading code reinforces design principles and forward thinking. Producing code is an exercise of pure focus, deliberate thought and problem-based execution of intentional decisions.

So yeah… we should be teaching those literacies because they are quite applicable to being human. At this point in 2011, coding and programming are perhaps the best way to get us to those proficiencies.

Blessed are the hackers.