Why It’s Important For Kids To Code

SEL, Social Emotional Learning, “is the process of developing the self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success.” SEL helps children understand their emotions, build relationships and make decisions, and there is no better way for young children to learn SEL than through coding!
 

Coding teaches children to communicate, collaborate, think creatively and critically. Along with a self-starter and problem-solving mindset, these are the most in demand skills in our current job market.
 

When learning in a coding class, students work in an environment that provides instant feedback and support. Writing code is difficult, it either works or not. When it does, there’s no greater feeling, however when it doesn’t it’s important that students learn to persevere. In particular, when wrong, students will have to debug! Meaning they’ll have to critically analyse their own code, identify the problem and solve it. A key concept of SEL is accepting that it’s ok to fail. Debugging teaches exactly that.
 

By joining a coding class, your child will learn to collaborate and communicate when solving problems. Whether it’s through debugging their own mistakes or teaching other students in the class. Some may find it surprising that communication is a key skill learned through coding, however it’s the most important skill of any coder!
 

The skills gained through coding are not so clear and constrained to being ‘hard’ skills such as reading and writing. The ‘soft skills’ learned are in fact endless. Not every student has to become a computer programmer, but by learning to code, a student will become more creative, collaborative and logically minded, all much needed skills for the future career of any child.
 

At Junior Engineers we teach coding and robotics to children of all ages and experience both in person and online. Having taught over 30,000 children over the past 7 years, we have seen many students develop into much more than just computer programmers! Our goal is to create fun and engaging coding and robotics courses to provide children with the needed fundamental 21st century skills. Learn more about our award-winning programs here.