TEACH YOUR CHILD CODING THROUGH EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES
Coding can often seem like a nebulous subject that lives in a corner, far from the rest. I'm thinking of the elephant graveyard in Lion King, you know, "everything the light touches" and all that. Well, the light doesn't seem to touch the coding. It's generally avoided by parents until they cave and buy an app or a robot for their kid thinking that's the only way they can learn.
Coding can often seem like a nebulous subject that lives in a corner, far from the rest. I'm thinking of the elephant graveyard in Lion King, you know, "everything the light touches" and all that. Well, the light doesn't seem to touch the coding. It's generally avoided by parents until they cave and buy an app or a robot for their kid thinking that's the only way they can learn.
I'm prepared to laugh in the face of danger. You don't have to be stuck choosing between a video game or a robot. Opportunities to teach coding can pop up in every area of life... and I'm not just talking to those who already know how to code themselves. Programming is just a language for expressing concepts we all are familiar with.
Hakuna Matata!
Four ideas to practice coding concepts in real life
So where do we start? It's easier than you think!
Clean your room. Everything from cleaning your room to looking for your keys is just an algorithm. Optimizing that algorithm will lead to a more efficient solution and therefore a quicker reward. For looking for your keys, for example, do you search all of one room first (depth-first search) or skim over the most likely places in each room before going back to the next most likely and so on (breadth-first search)? Talk algorithms like this through with your child before embarking on your task. What do they think? Give it a try! Next time, try a different algorithm. Compare. Contrast. Discuss. This is the heart of programming.
Problem solve. Next time you have a problem, even a small one, ask your child if they have any ideas for how to fix it. Give them the space and supplies to follow through on their design. Then use it, and let them know how helpful it was! My 5-year-old invented “Jonesi cones”... basically little paper road cones. He enthusiastically runs and grabs them whenever I'm sweeping so that everyone would know not to step in and scatter my dirt pile.
If you have a child who already has some programming skills, encourage them to create programs that solve specific needs in your house (think meal plan, chore chart, game scoreboard, or Christmas countdown clock).
Play board games. Board games are such a fantastic way of allowing children freedom in problem-solving. They craft their own solutions, their own strategies, and their own approach. They learn to optimize and be efficient, not to mention how to win with humility and lose with grace. All of these are crucial skills for an engineer.
Subscribe. Over at Salt and Lightspeed, I talk about educational concepts, tips, and ideas to help you encourage an atmosphere of creativity and engagement among your little coders. Salt and Lightspeed’s resources are entirely screen-free, so if you’re nervous about screen time but want to teach coding this is a great place to get started.
“The tools you already have at your disposal are your greatest ally!” -Lauren Schroeder
Lauren
ABOUT LAUREN from SALT & LIGHTSPEED
Lauren Schroeder was a Boeing Engineer who left the workplace to move overseas and become a homeschool mom and university educator. Excited to share her passion for coding with her kids, she was quickly discouraged by the lack of a comprehensive, real-world curriculum. Pulling together her experience coding, teaching, and momming, she wrote her own curriculum which can be found here.
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