Coding is now a real part of education, from Pre-K through graduate school. But the way we do it in early grades may be incomplete.
SAM Labs
Because we think about coding at early grades as a way to access these core concepts, we sidestep the career implications of coding. Generally, we don’t like to think of a third grader being prepared for the depleting experience of life-long work. And that’s fine. But the way we teach coding to young learners may be inadequate, incomplete. And if early coding lessons have the benefits we think they do, then we may have a problem. We may think we’re doing right by our kids when, in reality, we’re not doing enough.
SAM’s approach has been to build the lessons of coding – the logic, the sequencing, the experimentation – into physical blocks and pieces with pre-determined operations and functions. With those, kids build functioning simple machines and code-driven applications with their hands. The blocks are linked to a computer screen by Bluetooth so kids don’t miss out on seeing and engaging the experience digitally but that’s not the only way they experience it.
But that’s coding, not STEM. We’re not teaching seven year-olds to write actual code. If a goal of teaching coding early is to ignite young minds around STEM, we’d better know the difference.
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