Teach our kids to code? No, teach them how to think

Karl Beecher Debate rages right now over whether we should teach
our kids how to code. It's noble idea, one that acknowledges just
how important computers are in today's society. However, good
reasons exist to make us think it won't be a very effective
approach. For over three decades now, we've tried different ways to
teach computing skills to children. Instructing them in how to
encode algorithms was already tried as early as the 1980s, but it
didn't seem to instil skills that most children could actually
apply in their lives and careers. What's more, I argue that
teaching coding is an attempt to get the kids to walk before they
can run. After all, is teaching science best done by jumping
straight into experimentation, or shouldn't they also learn the
underlying principles like critical thinking and logical reasoning.
Similarly, coding is merely an application of computational ideas,
which the kids need to understand before getting to the
programming. A new approach to teaching computing skills in schools
is emerging: computational thinking. It takes just a handful of
core aspects from computer science and uses them teach how anyone
can abstract problems and formulate solutions -- specifically,
solutions which can be automated by a computer. The aim of teaching
computational thinking is to make it a problem-solving skill,
transferable across a diverse number of domains like natural
sciences, law, engineering, linguistics, medicine and social
sciences. What's more, it aims to prepare our children for life in
a society where seemingly everything in their lives is going to be
run by computers and where their careers are likely to involve
coming up with computer-based solutions. In this session, I will
share what I learned about computational thinking when I wrote a
book on it for the British Computer Society. I will argue why we
ought to teach computational thinking, not only as a
problem-solving skill, but as an essential way to understand life
in the 21st century.