Now Is the Time to Teach Your Kids to Code
Spend a weekend — or a monthlong at-home break — giving your kids a taste of programming
--
If you’re like millions of parents across the world, you’ve suddenly crashed into an unplanned at-home break with your kids. Many of the usual options for educational enrichment — museums, galleries, concerts — are shuttered. Helpful distractions like parks and playdates have been swallowed up by new rules of social distancing. And the odds are good that you’ll need to balance the chaos at home with the ongoing remote work requirements of your own job.
Here’s the good news: There is a way to keep your kids busy and help them learn something truly useful. Best of all, they can stay in their pajamas while they do it (pending parent approval, of course).
The answer is learning to code.
How to find good learn-to-code activities
In the past decade, the world has gone crazy for code-themed education. There’s an iPad app or battery-devouring robot caterpillar for every age. Many of these toys and games are perfectly fun activities that do very little to teach actual computer science concepts. To be kind, they overpromise. (To be less kind, their claims are bunk.)
That doesn’t mean we should teach our kids to code in the same way we teach adults. When it comes to interest and concentration, kids are all over the map. Some might be perfectly comfortable powering through an online Codecademy course about JavaScript. Others won’t stay engaged unless they have the opportunity for creativity and free play.
After three daughters and plenty of experiments, I’ve learned that you get the best parent-effort-to-child-learning ratio when you start with smaller chunks and discrete activities. I call this approach a “taste of programming,” and — in true nerd parent fashion — I used my experience to build a flowchart that can guide you through the options.
