Transcending Barriers One Line of Code at a Time

Coding is moving mainstream.

Rafts of articles are showing up on business and education sites, touting the benefits of teaching kids to code.

One of the biggest things that gets lost in the noise is the idea that learning to code is simply learning another way to communicate, just another language. These languages differ from what most people understand as language though, because they are not generally used to communicate person to person but rather, person to computer.

And that is where people’s understanding of the importance of coding languages took a wrong turn, because they didn’t generally grasp that these languages are akin to Esperanto in their ability to transcend barriers. Learning a coding language gives children the power to communicate in a new way, with people across the world. It sharpens their thinking skills. And it gives them some real control over both their learning and their application of that learning.

Here are a just a couple recent articles about kids and coding:

• Coding in the Classroom: A Long-Overdue Inclusion, by Merle Huerta, on Edutopia
• For Silicon Valley Hopefuls, Is College Irrelevant?, by Kathryn Joyce, on Medium’s Bright

Happy reading!