How Children Learn to Code

Lessons borrowed from teaching children to write stories

@santivedri unsplash.com

You want to teach your child to code. Your child seems to be interested in all things “functional”. How the wheels of a car turns? Why is there a gear in the middle of this structure? How to create a table from wooden construction kit you bought your child for Christmas. Your child is a natural engineer. It’s only the logical step that your child should learn to code.

Every child is a little scientist, engineer, and coder.

The critical skill that links all of these professions together is simply curiosity. Children have curiosity in abundance.

Every child is also a writer, a painter, and a performer.

The critical skills that links all of these professions together is simply creativity. Children have creativity in abundance.

Teaching a young child at its core is simply to foster curiosity and creativity in abundance. Curiosity is the foundation of intrinsic motivation which is the key ingredient to pursue STEM. Creativity is the foundation of outside of the box thinking which is the key ingredient to pursue creative endeavors. Therefore, these two skills will serve the child well in many professions across the spectrum and in life.

How to foster curiosity in a young child?

Every young child is curious about the surroundings. It’s not so much fostering curiosity as sustaining curiosity in a young child. Have you ever been annoyed at all the questions that your child came up with in the last few hours. Answering them literally took all your mental energy for the month out of you. But, you did it because it’s your child. It warms your heart to see your child coming up with so many questions. Well, this is what sustaining your child’s curiosity looks like. It’s to answer those questions even when you just want to pull a blanket over your head and scream. This is when extreme patience is called for. When you answer those questions that your child has, your child will come up with more questions. This is how your child will learn that it’s SAFE to ask questions. This is how your child will learn that answers will come. By answering these questions, you are fostering your child’s intrinsic motivation to ask questions.

Being able to ask the right questions is the foundation of any STEM career.

How to foster creativity in a young child?

Fostering true creativity in a young child is a messy process. I often bump into parents who tell me that either I have a creative child or a child who’s well behaved. When my child is young, there’s no middle ground. I see that. I see this in my own child. Fostering creativity often means letting your child get messy and following your child’s thoughts in your child’s creations. Cleaning up these messes in your house again and again reassures your child that creativity is valued. Fostering creativity also means that parents often have to bend the rules a little. In a crafting class where the teacher is telling the students to color the turkey in brown, do you let your child make a neon pink turkey with flaming orange fur? That is what it takes to foster creativity in a young child.

Defying the norm and the convention is the foundation of a outside box thinking that is essential in any creative career.