When should students learn basic code?

Post Reply New Topic

I remember when I was sixteen, I started a web design course. One of the first conversations I had with other classmates was about what age we began coding.

"Oh, I was making websites in year six".

"Admittedly we only properly started with that stuff in year nine".

Then I was asked.

"My school didn't teach us, I taught myself a few basics over the Summer with the help of the internet".

Both of them looked at me with shock.

"Wait, so you didn't learn at all?"

"Nope"

"In Secondary you did, right?"

"Nope"

"Primary?"

"Nope"

"...What did you even do in IT?"

"Uh, we made a fake weather report once".

"Your school sounds terrible".

"It is".

So, when do you think is a good time to teach students the basics of HTML and Javascript? You might be wondering why I went into a web design course despite the lack of coding knowledge at the time. I didn't have many other options, that course matched the few things that I'm good at, thus the only way forward seemed to be to teach myself how to code. Fortunately, our teacher started out fairly simple, so I wasn't too out of my depth.

I don't know about the school system in England. I didn't learn coding at all until college, and I don't think college students had to take a coding course, just a basic computer course.

I think teaching coding before college is a new thing (except maybe in fancy private schools).

never heard of coding education being mandatory in any way

I developed my first website about 20 years ago. I didn't have any coding class. I just learned it on the go. I looked at the html structure and how others put websites together. And then I built one. Today the website design tool are very easy to use.

Make the kids learn FORTRAN.

Thank you for that laugh. I learned FORTRAN 77 back in college as part of one of my majors. I still have my coding books from those classes from 25 years ago. Students would look at it much like a rotary phone, ancient lost technology to them.

I got an A+ in Fortran!

My high school had the classes, but I think late middle school would be good because then kids can decide if its something they enjoy and would like to take in high school. It was often an overlooked class because it was typically only people who had already done it and wanted to learn more that took it. It was just a 'for fun' class not required or anything. Like woodworking or horticulture.

I think kids should get to try different vocations as early as possible, especially programming as it is something that rarely is discovered at home playing with computers (especially if steam or similar is installed.

There seems to be a global shortage of programmers and we need to awaken any programmer with the right mindset as early as possible to make them chose the right path.

I read somewhere that programming was being considered in high school (or was it college) here in Sweden. When i grew up, either you had a good teacher that at least let you play around with QBasic or maybe even C - or you only learned word processing and MSDos

I learned to code on the C64 and continued on the Amiga. In school later on i got a good teacher that introduced me to the PC world and i got to tinker with Macs as well.

Something that really makes me sad is "You have to learn language X and nothing else". When i was a teacher for 2 terms at a college, i showed my students Visual Basic (and .net), C++ and Javascript, they even learned SQL and HTML to go with those. After the course they knew the similarities of Switch Case in C++/Java vs Select Case in Visual basic, and understood WHEN they should use such a statement. I taught them PROGRAMMING - not a LANGUAGE.

Scratch and Minecraft are very good for teaching Primary aged children the basics of coding

It depends on what kind of field your hoping to go into. There's no benefit in learning to code if you're going to be a teacher for example, unless it is for personal development/entertainment.

Perhaps as soon as the student decides they want to focus on a field where coding is useful. Physics for example. So around late GCSE/early A-level?

The www.code.org is a good resource.

School? Learn Programming? Would've been nice for me, ASSEMBLY and FORTRAN I heard is good, and depending on what computer you use, Then its either the C's or something with a nice syntax, like Ruby/On rails or elsewise Java, JS and .NET/VB etc.

If not, stick to advanced maths, maybe algebra? and some AI, Architecture. I love software but everybody should know hardware. So that monster math will come in handy if you venture for an Electrical Engineering, Specialist or if you really just want theory, then CompSci.

But what do I know? I didn't even finish school because the principal didn't even know how to USE A COMPUTER to give me the classes I asked for! It's either ironic or tragic. I cannot fathom.

The basics, like class structure, variables, how loops and so on works could be taught to a middle schooler, perhaps even younger students. More and more jobs will require some knowledge about machine learning and robots in the future. Programming isn't just for software developers anymore.