Bill Gates
Chairman, Microsoft
Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and
helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I
think is helpful in all domains.
There's a low hum out there in the real world, the talk of an older generation that feels technology is making kids lazier and less intelligent, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In the day of the text, kids are constantly writing to each other, to parents, and to their teachers. Not only are they writing more, but they are learning early on how to write for each audience. The audience forum extends as well to blogs that kids create to express themselves. The ability to write for an audience used to be exclusive to the published authors of this world. Now everyone has access to a forum for their creativity. You could argue that texts encourage sloppy, abbreviated writing skills, but you'd be wrong. There's plenty of new research that supports that today's kids have a unique ability to change their style across all forums for writing. This is in direct corrolation to the early experience they are getting by using technology.
Stanford University's Professor Lunsford states, "The fact that students today almost always write for an audience
(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different
sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined
good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them,
writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's
over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less
enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but
the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a
grade."
Richard Branson
Founder, Virgin Group
Whether we're fighting climate change or going to
space, everything is moved forward by computers, and we don't have
enough people who can code. Teaching young people to code early on can
help build skills and confidence and energize the classroom with
learning-by-doing opportunities. I learned how to fly a hot air balloon
when I was 30,000 feet up and my life was in the balance: you can learn
skills at any age but why wait when we can teach everyone to code now!
Learning code is becoming a force in writing as well. Writing code is essential to being able to "read" technology. A real understanding of one cannot happen without the other. Coding is based on "if, then, and when" statements that allow kids to understand some basic concepts of literature and strengthen the foundations of writing. Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Labs and the kids coding program Scratch points out that coding games work to their highest potential when kids see them as a motivator
and a meaningful tool to learn. When kids learn in schools about
variables they don’t really understand why they’re doing it, which is
why they aren’t learning it as deep or as good as in the games. But he
expresses that variables are just the beginning, kids are now learning
about design, collaborating with other people, finding and fixing bugs,
perseverance. All really important skills for the everyday workforce. The
kids who learn this information are going to have a competitive edge
when they grow up, there’s no doubt about it.
