At what age should children be introduced to coding, and how? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by David Yang, Co-Founder and Lead Instructor at Fullstack Academy, on Quora:
At what age should children be introduced to coding, and how? Having just had my own son (April 2015), I'm wondering about this as well. I'm not a neuroscientist but I suspect that the brain crosses various stages throughout its growth that allow people to work at higher levels of abstraction and that you'd need to cross some basic thresholds before you could do programming with the tools we have currently. To be honest, I've not looked into tools like Scratch that are made for kids as young as eight years old.
That being said, my own dream is to create a high school curriculum that's formulated around letting children use computers to help them think through various subjects. In my experience, that's when I really started understanding how to use programming to think through various problems. I had an amazing history teacher in high school that taught history using flowcharts and each chapter was a subset of the entire graph of history. Letting kids use things like D3 to visualize it, and graph databases to query it, would be an awesome way to get their brains engaged with history more than just memorizing facts or exploring narratives. Another example I remember is programming a basic calculator for area under a graph in my calculus class and only through exploring it that way through my own code did I get a good handle on it.
Based on the popularity of Legos and now Minecraft, kids are always looking for ways that play can engage and enhance their creativity. The computer is like the steam engine for the mind, it lets you enhance your thought processes in so many ways that I think we're really just at the beginning of exploring their usefulness.
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