Why You Should Teach Your 4-year-old Kid Programming and How?

As in the message of the website code.org, which is the first site praised in teaching children programming from kindergarten age (4 years) and it is my beginning in the field:

Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn programming

I believe that programming is a means, a means of creativity and self-expression, not a goal in itself, and everyone has the right to take his right to express his creativity.

Instead of playing video games only, your kid can participate in making them, and this is what we want to reach with our children.

“Do not give me a fish, but teach me how to fish.”

In the beginning, learning programming is never intended to make the child work as a game developer or something else like that. This is an apparent goal, even if we aim for him in the future.

why programming?

• The main reason for teaching programming for kids is to help them how to solve problems in many ways and logical thinking with every situation.
• And to clarify the greatness of Allah’s creation for the human mind, and how he teach human this science and made his life so easy with all the developments around us.
• Of course, one of the most important features of learning programming is the available work, and there is no limit for age, especially in the field of self-employment.

The most important question,

How do I start with my child and when?

First, we will agree that the books that teaching programming are for the parents not for the child unless they contain paper activities.

According to the articles and sites, they start from the age of 4 years old and even more younger : D

Through my experience, this age up to 7 years cannot understand the concepts and the way we deal with the tools, but we can work with them on paper activities that enhance logical thinking without a reference to programming in the first place.

It called unplugged activities, and recently I tried to make these activities as an online workshop for parents from age 3 years old, I hope I can reach every kid in the world and teach him how to code!

At this age 3 or 4 yo, you can also use something like kopeto (it is a robot with integrated software to teach children how to code with simple blocks of code put on the attached mat of the robot) and by the way, it is made in Egypt.

By 7 years old, try if he likes the field or not if you can’t start it before

We will start with sites with free parts of the courses provided if we can follow it or let us attend simple workshops to test its comprehension and love the subject.

We provide the same information, the way to describe information varies according to the age of the student. I can teach the same concept to a 10-years old child or a 15-years old child or even a university student 20 years or older, too, the key is how to simplify it.

Sites I tried: code.org robogarden.com lightbot.com tynker.com

You can try free sessions or hour of code to test how your child will react with coding, I have tried these sites myself with different kids, their method is very simple and fun in providing information through a game that the child solves so that he can understand a specific concept.

After that, if you find that you kid love to code and want to complete it, you can start with drag and drop programming courses, further we can get into a written programming language. Either he would complete his path in programming games, or with scripting programming, the concepts are the same.

The other way is that if your child is over 15 years old, you can start with written programming languages, which is we write commands in a specific syntax for each language (JAVA, PYTHON, etc). Or if he wants to continue through another way, like mobile applications, desktop applications, or even web programming he will be able to continue with the very basic concepts that he learns in the very first hour of code and he will thank you for that.

A small workshop example:

the workshop is from this site

We want to teach children how to solve a problem or a task We will provide them with some information and a drawing.

First of all, we will demonstrate that the game is a group game and one of the players will act as the robot who has no brain and cannot think at all.

The rest of the group (engineers) will give the robot the instructions to solve it. Instructions are demonstrated in the following picture

We need to make from these 3 cups the shape of the second picture.

Try it yourself. :)