Parents these days are constantly asking if early exposure to coding brings benefits to their child. Intuitively, it is easy to argue for its benefits especially within the competitive Singapore education. But why stop there? We like to share some conclusions from a paper titled Development of computational thinking, digital competence and 21st century skills when learning programming in K-9 published on the Education Inquiry journal in 2020.
This study follows Swedish teachers who had been teaching programming for a couple of years on their own initiative. The teachers were selected based on their experience in teaching programming. Interviews were conducted to shed light on what skills teachers perceive pupils develop when programming. This study identified 3 themes related to computational thinking skills as well as cognitive and language skills that were developed as students learn to code.
Computational concepts
Sequences
Loops
Events
Parallelism
Conditionals
Operators
Data
Computational practice skills
Being incremental and iterative
Testing and debugging
Reusing and remixing
Abstracting and modularizing
Computational perspective skills
Expressing
Connecting
Questioning
Cognitive skills
Logical thinking skills
Symbolic/abstract thinking skills
Accuracy
Courage to make mistakes and test things
Patience/persistence
Language skills
Programming language comprehension
Syntax (programming)
Compressing code
Vocabulary
The Logic Coders is a coding school for kids aged 6-16 in Singapore
Locations: City Square Mall #06-05 & Parkway Centre #13-07
We offer term-time and holiday programs using the Lego EV3 Robotics platform and Python
Learn more at: https://www.thelogiccoders.com.sg/