You may have noticed that teaching kids how to code is becoming more and more popular. But is coding for kids just a fad or is it something worth looking into?
There actually are many benefits to teaching your kids how to code, and it will help them develop a number of skills that they can use throughout many areas of their lives. So if you are thinking that online summer coding courses for your child might be a good idea, then you should definitely give it a go.
Here are five reasons why online summer coding camps for kids is a great idea.
1. Develop Many Skills
As a child learns how to code they also develop a number of other skills during the process. Here are a handful of examples:
- Develop essential critical thinking and problem solving skills as they analyze complex problems and learn how to solve them.
- Develop computational thinking: a kind of thought process where children learn to logically break down problems into parts in order to solve them more easily.
- Learn that patience and persistence pays off, and to not give up no matter how challenging something may seem.
- Learn math skills as mathematics is a huge part of coding.
- Develop their creativity as they create new and exciting things out of code.
2. Keep Their Minds Active
During summer vacation something called “summer learning loss” can occur for children who don’t stimulate their brain over the break. Basically what happens is their brain becomes lax and forgets many of the things it learned over the school year. It’s been noticed that affected students tend to perform poorly for a month after they return.
Coding camp is a great way to keep your kids’ brains working over the summer break!
3. Meet New People
Summer camp offers opportunities to meet new people and potentially make new friends. Some coding camps will assign projects to teams of students where they need to develop something out of code – like a video game. This gives them the opportunity to work as a group online and learn the importance of teamwork.
4. Understand Our Digital World Better
Computers are everywhere and a part of almost everything we do. Kids these days are growing up in a digital age, and knowing how to code will give them a better understanding of how the world works. It’s one thing to wonder at how fascinating and powerful technology can be, but a whole other to actually understand how it works.
5. Opens Up Career Paths
Knowing programming languages and how to code is useful for a number of career opportunities down the road, including video game developer, software engineer, and app developer. But the skills developed when learning code can be easily used in other unrelated jobs. Also, employers tend to like to see “coding” as a skill on resumes – it makes candidates a more attractive hire.
Not Just a Fad
As you can see, coding for kids isn’t just a fad – there are a lot of lessons to be learned. So don’t be afraid to sign them up to learn how to code during the summer; it may just be an experience that they never forget!
