Reading, writing and programming

We were doing some programming for homeschool this past week.  I didn't intend it.  I'm not much of a programmer myself, and the idea interests me only vaguely, but my eldest began doing Kahn Academy's Hour of Coding, and he loves it.  He loves that he can make things, colour them, move them around, all perfectly.  There's no struggling to make true circles by hand or drawing lengths with rulers.   He just types what he wants, and it happens, exactly how he wanted.

His coding experience surpassed mine in about twenty minutes, and so I contacted a friend who is involved in programming and open learning, and he directed me to some further resources.  His girls, also homeschooled, have both done a bit of basic coding, not because it is their passion necessarily, but because they are interested, and because, as my friend put it, basic programming is almost as important to understanding our modern world as basic reading and writing, though most people know much less about it.

And he's right, of course.  We rely on our electronic devices to do just about everything, but very few of us have any idea at all about how they actually operate.  We can't write the simplest of programs for them, can't troubleshoot them, can't do much more than buy them.  So, I don't know whether my kids will ever program professionally, but I do want them to program at least casually, and I want to learn with them, because coding is a skill, like reading and mathematics, that opens up new possibilities and opportunities that would otherwise be closed to them.