Programming Is The Core Skill Of The 21st Century

Programming skills are becoming increasingly important, and are emerging as an essential core competency for all kinds of 21st Century workers.

According to Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November 2012, the point of teaching kids to code isn’t to create a generation of programmers.  Rather, it is because coding is a gateway to broader spectrum of learning. “When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says. Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too."  Resnick also believes that young people consider themselves "digital natives" because they can text and chat and play games, he says, “but using technologies doesn’t really make one a digital native or fluent in technology.”  

Fluency comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. Resnick means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.

So how can our youth learn how to code when it is not being taught inside the classroom?

At the present time, both businesses and  young people have to be creative to seek out new ways of learning this essential skill.

When daily deal site Living Social couldn't find the coding help it needed, the company took matters into its own hands and successfully created its own qualified programmers. Through an experiment called Hungry Academy,  Living Social paid 24 people to learn computer programming within five months. All two dozen passed the class and became full-time developers at Living Social following their graduation.

“We believe that intelligence and passion are far harder to hire for and much more important than a specific technical skill,” Chad Fowler, LivingSocial’s senior vice president of technology, told the Washington Post last year. “We have enough of the kind of DIY sort of mentality here and, maybe it’s a little bit of hubris, we can teach faster than the industry.”

For students, there are many free online resources such as Codecademy, where individuals can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby.

As learning online in an isolated environment can be daunting for some, individuals may choose to participate in out of school coding clubs to learn the basics in a supported environment, when such options are available.

If you live in Longford, why not contact Alert Learning and see if your son or daughter has the passion to learn how to code this Halloween?  

Check out http://www.alertlearning.blogspot.ie/ for more information.