Monday, March 24, 2014

Let's teach kids to code

This man is worth listening to, so we are posting also this excellent TED talk by him in 2012.

"Young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies". 

"When you learn through coding, [you're] coding to learn. You're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things".

Coding isn’t just for computer whizzes, says Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab — it’s for everyone. In a fun, demo-filled talk he outlines the benefits of teaching kids to code, so they can do more than just “read” new technologies — but also create them. When we first enter primary school, we spend our days creating, painting, building, experimenting creatively with form and shape. But what happens after that first year? Why doesn't the creativity continue? Mitch Resnick, also Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten program and LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at MIT Media Lab, makes it his mission to help kids keep the exploration going. He and his team develop new interfaces to help students engage with technology, in a way that encourages them to create and experiment the way we did in kindergarten with paint.

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