Skip to main content

Teaching Kids the Concepts of Programming — How important is this?

Code kids? Let me start by saying that I was NOT a code kid. Generally speaking a code kid is a kid that starts programming at early age and by early age, I am talking about 6 to 12 years old. I was good in math and science, but the first time I was exposed to programming was in grade 8 which is considered late by code-kid standards :)
In grade 8, I was writing code on paper and asking one of my friends to borrow his Commodore-64 to see what it runs. I was excited to see my first for-loop working. When I really got into it, I was in grade 11 and 12.
I enjoyed it and I have been deep in this world ever since. There is a level of satisfaction that programmers get when they figure out a problem after hours of troubleshooting. It is hard to explain until you experience, and you also can experience it.
Does every kid need to end up working as a software developer? No, they don’t, but being introduced to programming in early days is very important for exposing kids to different type of problems and clever solutions for those problems. It is actually not the final solutions that are important; it is the approach and thought process that is more important.
The level at which humans think, and the approach humans take to solve problems is much more advanced than the level that computers are at. Computers are good in repeating things that you program them for, and we as humans need to program them. You really need to explain to computers in layman terms how they should perform something in the form instructions. So we should give ourselves a lot of credit for that. Teaching kids how to break problems into layman terms is not easy, but kids are smart and they absorb information much faster than adults can. Combining these problem-solving skills with good communication skills is a powerful recipe for success.
Here are the links to some of the organizations that put their passion into introducing kids to coding/programming:
Try it out. Have fun !
Almir Mustafic



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Daylight saving time and A Software Engineering state of mind ?

You may be wondering what the Daylight saving time has to do with a software engineering state of mind. When thinking about writing this article, at first I thought to start with the following joke and I am: “ Did you know that the Daylight saving time was started because a software developer coded a function that does smart timezone and configurable calculations and then this developer created a problem to solve to use the algorithm; hence, the Daylight saving time was born. ” This is a joke, but  on a more serious note , this brings me to a state of mind in software engineering that make this joke a reality to some degree. How many times did we find ourselves in situations where we learned something new in programming and we looked for ways to apply it at any cost? How many times did we see a cool new feature from a creator of a framework and we decided to use it even though that was not the right solution for the problem or maybe there was no problem to solve in the ...

Leaders/Mentors in my life

I have been blessed in my software engineering career with great leaders. Some of them challenged me in technical skills. Some of them challenged me in my organization and leadership skills. Some of them challenged me in both. And all of them made me a better software engineer, a better senior engineer, a better solutions architect, a better teammate, and a better leader. If you are a student, find yourself a mentor. If you are a junior software engineer, find yourself a mentor. If you are an experienced software engineer, find yourself a mentor. Remember, you write your own definition of success and you are your own critic. That may mean that you TRY to perfect every stage of your career, or that may mean that you skip some stages in your career. Remember, you are in control. That’s all I wanted to say today :) Keep geeking out. Almir

OWNING your sandbox

OWNING your sandbox. As software engineers we all like to work on latest technology and coding new applications. People generally don’t like spending a lot of time maintaining the code. However, in the world of microservices the owners of each microservice are very well known and defined unlike in the world of monolithic applications. That means that you own it in the true sense. You own the code. You own the QA environment. You own the Stage environment. You own the production environment and all the errors that come along with it :) On positive note, you have a lot to be proud of and you can turn it into opportunities :) You own something that is contributing your company’s customers and what you do responsibly affects the lives of many people in a positive way. Almir Mustafic