What coding is, how it can be playfully made a topic in elementary education and what learning opportunities it offers. It is almost like a Math class for teenagers now.
In kindergarten, of course, it’s not about teaching children how to program using programming language or source code. Instead, it is about the playful promotion of skills that are not only necessary in coding but also in everyday life:
Learning by doing
Orientation and structuring competence: systems of order are built up, ability to classify, seriation. Recording of spatial position, shapes and proportions are essential there.
- Understanding symbols develops as a prerequisite for writing and arithmetic
- Forward-looking and networked thinking
- Creative competence: own ideas are developed and tried out
- Problem-solving skills and finding your innovative solutions
- Media literacy: first experience with robots, handling computers
- Linguistic and communicative competence: getting to know new terms and acquiring language understanding
- Emotional competence: Conscious experience
- Social competence: the ability to work in a team, be considerate, ability to criticize
What is coding?
Coding or programming means giving commands to the computer or robot by entering a code and creating games, programs, or websites or controlling robots. Learning AP Calculus or Python will be important in these cases.
The code consists of characters and symbols that represent specific commands. The code can look and be entered very differently: from effortless typing of control keys (e.g. Bee-Bot) to complicated programming languages.
Conclusion
Children mostly know the computer or tablet as a device for playing digital games, programs and apps and surfing the Internet. The medium is primarily used for entertainment or information gathering. The content is only recorded, not created by the user. On the other hand, programming means becoming a creative designer of media products and thus also your environment. Those who can program become active themselves, can develop new things and implement their ideas. It is also becoming more and more important in everyday life because those who have at least a basic knowledge of coding not only have better opportunities in the job market later but can also move through our (media) world and actively shape it.
