Help your child learn to code, and choose an IT course.
IT careers offer exciting employment opportunities for young people, and learning to code is increasingly important for young people. Around the world, coding and robotics is now part of the school curriculum. For parents and teachers, this can be daunting to navigate. How can you help a child learn to code if you are not a coding expert? We believe in making learning to code as fun and easy as possible. We’ve put together information for parents and teachers based on questions we get asked.
In short, coding is telling a computer what to do. To tell a computer what to do, one needs to write a series of instructions in a coding language. A series of instructions to a computer are collectively known as a computer program. A program could be written in one of many different programming languages.
Different languages are used to do different things, so there is no real way of judging one programming language as definitively ‘the best’. Some languages like Python are particularly good for educational purposes. JavaScript can run in a web browser and so doesn’t require a development environment to be set up to see the code in action. Languages like Java, C# and PHP have been widely used in industry over the years and so Java, C# and PHP developers are currently needed in industry to work on this software. The good news is that if a child learns one language, they will be able to learn another language more easily.
Scratch is a block-based programming language. Block-based programming languages are programming languages where instructions are mainly represented as blocks as opposed to text. For educational purposes these have particular merit because a student can focus on the problem at hand without needing to type lines of code and know the syntax of a particular programming language. This means that coding with a block-based language like Scratch can feel more like putting together a puzzle or playing with Lego than writing Greek.
Coding is now considered a key literacy. Coding lets someone harness the power of computers. To know how to code, one needs to understand the following concepts which are the foundation of all programming languages:
sequencing: identifying a series of steps class="has-text-weight-semibold" for a task span: running the same sequence multiple times parallelism: making things happen at the same time events: one thing causing another thing to happen conditionals: making decisions based on conditions operators: support for mathematical and logical expressions data: storing, retrieving, and updating valuesThe most important skill as a coder is the ability to learn. Technology is changing all the time, so developers are expected to learn new languages all the time. Employers expect developers to be able to learn new languages. One should choose a course that will help you understand how to learn how to learn effectively. IT companies are more interested in a candidate’s code portfolio than their qualification. It is important that you do courses that help you build a code portfolio.