The only languages we were taught at school when I was growing up were French and German and if I’m being honest I only really remember hello, goodbye, how many brothers and sisters I have and all the swearwords.
My children however have a whole new world opened up to them and believe it or they are learning the language of the internet, they are learning to code! My eldest son is nine years old and has been using Scratch at school for a couple of years now as part of the school curriculum. He also attends Code Club at the local library once a fortnight where he continues to code (Python soon) and on top of this has started using Command Blocks to “code” in Minecraft.
All of these coding languages, all of these opportunities; we as parents think the fact that all of this is available to him is fantastic. It doesn’t hurt that we are all a bit geeky (in a good way) and enjoy this sort of thing.
Recently Kieran has been asking questions about secondary school (he has 18 months or so of primary school left!). After search the local “big” school for answers to certain questions we came across a news article about the schools coding club, Raspberry Pi. Some code they wrote as part of a competition was selected as a winner and sent up to the International Space Station, the team involved visited Tim Peake himself at a special event in his honour and had the good fortune to meet Professor Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. To say that he thought this was cool is a huge understatement.
The point I’m trying to make is that our children have this fabulous opportunity to learn to code and if they wish literally go on and shape the internet, our digital devices, how things work and more. That is pretty amazing stuff.
Roy and I are very much behind this aspect of their learn and are keen to support it and help them go as far as they want and as far as they can. Personally I’ll have to do some reading up on coding as I still struggle with HTML but between us, the school, code club and all of the other resources available to them I see a very bright future for the boys and I can help but be excited by that.
Do your children enjoy coding? What do they do (Scratch, Python, Raspberry Pi?). Who knows, maybe some of this knowledge will rub off and this not-so code savvy Mum will be able to manage some basic programming at some point?
