Programming: A Healthy Part of a Balanced Education

"Technology has transformed education but while students learn how to use it, they rarely learn how it works." -Nick Morrison, Forbes

I'm just going to go right out and say it. A district does a huge disservice to students when programming is not offered as part of the educational buffet. Simple as that. I'll list a few reasons why.

Flickr: hackNY.com

Logic, abstraction, and language all wrapped up into one class

We are past the days of single subjects being taught. We no longer need to confine our lessons or classrooms to the idea that a subject should be taught in isolation. We understand many subjects to be interdisciplinary, such as science and social studies. While this may be possible in your 7th grade Social Studies course, courses in programming may require a more singular focus. This doesn't mean that programming doesn't offer the development of other core skills such as logic, abstraction and language.

Logic

Not many can dispute the importance of logic in thinking. Cause and effect are ELA Literacy Common Core standards that start in the 3rd grade. While this can be taught within a reading concept, programming allows students to further develop their sense of cause and effect by teaching concepts such as user input and event-based action sequences. These skills allow students to dig deeper into problems and helps build resilience when trying to find an answer.

Abstraction

Children have a tendency towards concrete thinking. A glass is meant for drinking fluids. A fork for eating food. Shoes for wearing on your feet. Though concrete thinking can benefit us when solving problems, abstract thinking can help lead students to more creative solutions. Abstract thinking can lead students to better understand literature, mathematical concepts, foreign language, and promote college readiness. Programming allows for abstract thinking by helping students solve complex problems through the interaction of new systems. Many of these systems may already have a tinge of familiarity (such as HTML), yet through abstraction are they able to understand the foundations of the systems they are exploring.

Language

Learning to program overlaps some foundations behind learning a new language. As Paul King states,   

"Both programming and human language make use of grammatical structures which can be recursive. To the extent that human language involves the expression of human thought, and human thought can be structured and encoded as a sequence of symbols, there is a certain similarity there as well. And it seems likely that the same areas of the brain that process grammatical structure during reading are also involved in processing the grammatical structure of a program or math equation when reading those." 

Learning to program has the potential to help students develop important executive functions used in language development. Some argue a link between coding and the language processing centers of our brains. 

Whichever way you look at it, there is an intellectual benefit to those students who learn to program. I argue that districts begin the process of looking at ways to include programming as part of their curriculum offerings, and encourage students to register. You must ask yourself, if the computer programming industry is expected to grow 15% between 2012-2022 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who will be filling those positions and are you preparing today's youth for this field of work?

If you or someone you know has already integrated programming within your class or school, please feel free to comment below your successes.