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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:
Learn
Anyone can learn the basic concepts of Computer Science. Choose an intro activity to start learning.code.org
Every child deserves opportunity
The Hour of Code is a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code and show that anybody can…hourofcode.com
Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share
Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games…scratch.mit.edu
Try it out. Have fun !
Almir Mustafic



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