Coding for Children and Young Adults in Libraries by Wendy Harrop

Author:Wendy Harrop [Harrop, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Teaching Coding to Older Children and Young Adults

In This Chapter

Why Do Young Adults Need to Know How to Code?

Where Will They Use Coding?

Programs for Coding with Older Learners

Books for Coding for Young Adults

Coding Music

Activity Ideas

“Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn.”

—Stephen Hawking (Code.org)

Why Do Young Adults Need to Know How to Code?

Any reading you do about computer science and coding will mention careers and opportunities. Many employers are looking for candidates who know coding languages like Python, SQL, or Java. And these are the employers who have high-paying jobs to offer. We need to be sure our older children and young adults have the opportunity to compete for these jobs and the skills to make them qualified for these future positions. Young adulthood is often when people tend to develop programming as a hobby, as well. Many older children will likely at this point have a certain level of familiarity with the beginning coding programs, so they are looking for something more challenging and more versatile. They want to get more involved with coding for robotics, for controlling drones, for building websites and apps, or for learning about hacking (not all hacking is bad!).

The focus of coding instruction with older learners is more on understanding how things work. Rather than just coding for the sake of learning to code, your older learners are going to want to code to create something or control something. The language taught to older coders really depends on what they want to do with it. If they’re specifically wanting to build a computer using an Arduino board, for example, then they will need to learn the Arduino coding language.

One of the biggest challenges that libraries and schools face in teaching older learners how to code is that they may have a very wide range of prior experience and understanding of coding languages. While many are likely to have had similar exposure in school, those who have been involved in robotics or who code as a hobby may have a much broader knowledge of different languages. It is not essential for librarians, teachers, or facilitators to know all of the coding languages, but they should certainly know how to find them, and be comfortable with some basic debugging/troubleshooting to support more advanced learners.

Where Will They Use Coding?

Robotics

Whether as part of a formal robotics competition team or just a fan of the many types of robots on the market currently, to use and control a robot or drone, they need to understand how to program them. Most of the more common robots and drones use drag-and-drop block programming, like Scratch, Blockly, or Tickle. Many robotics activities involve a pair or a group of people working together to solve a challenge, which not only teaches coding skills, but teamwork, collaboration, negotiation, problem solving, and communication.

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