The Importance of Coding in Education

The presentation by both of my classmates last week was very interesting and comprehensive, where I learned a lot about coding. Personally, I believe that coding is very powerful and useful in today’s society — it can give students the logical thinking and problem solving skills, as well as make them improve their creativity. According to Nduta (2023), coding can be defined as writing instructions for computers and other hardware. The computer is then able to read the instructions (also called programs) and do what one has asked it to do. This can be complicated because computer language is different from human language — a human needs to learn computer language (programming languages) to write programs that the computer can understand.

Presently, coding is used by large corporations like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and others in their businesses. However, even smaller businesses and organizations use code to build their websites and applications in order to improve their business growth, eventually. Thus, coding is significant in the business world as it affects our daily lives and how we go about our business.

Directly, one may think that not all students may benefit from learning how to code, since not everyone will want to pursue a career in computer science. However, indirectly, especially elementary and high school students, they may learn to think more critically and logically when they are taught coding in school. Coding boosts problem-solving skills, improves computational thinking, and helps teach digital literacy. The younger students can benefit in learning how to code because technology surrounds us; it facilitates communication, supports practically all our work, and supports nearly every business/industry in the global economy. Thus, as the younger children need to know technology, they need to be digitally literate.

In my case, I have not yet engaged in coding in my previous classes. I know it is essential in this modern technology-driven world, however, I did not exactly know before how to integrate it in my classes. Perhaps it is because I used to teach college students from different majors, and the subjects I used to teach were in the social sciences; subjects that are more theoretical in nature. Perhaps I think that teaching coding should be done separately (specific subject like Computer learning or Introduction to Computers) rather than to integrate it in social science subjects. It also holds me back because I am not a very technical person in terms of advanced computer skills like coding. Therefore, I believe that it would be very beneficial to both the educators and students if someone with a technical background should teach coding. Not everyone has to be a computer science major to teach coding; for example, a mathematics or statistics major, or an engineering major can teach coding with the proper computer programming background. Like the speaker in the Tedx Talk video below, Matthew Reynolds — he taught mathematics in various boarding schools in different countries, yet discusses the importance of coding and why students should learn to code. Someone with a technical background will appreciate more with regards to teaching coding, and the students will also learn more for their advantage in the future.