Why Teach Coding to Early Elementary Learners

Introduction

Steve Jobs once said, “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer…because it teaches you how to think.” He said this over twenty years ago, and schools are starting to catch up to his vision (Code.org, 2013). 47% of public high schools offer coding courses, and there were over 1 million teacher and 36 million student accounts on Code.org at the end of 2018, up from 10,000 and 500,000, respectively, in 2013 (Code.org, 2021a; Code.org, 2021b). In the employment realm, computer science is projected to make up 67% of new STEM jobs in the United States by 2028, totaling nearly 600,000 jobs (Code.org, 2021b). However, only 25.2% of people employed in computing fields in 2020 identified as women, and less than 35% were non-white (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021). Even earlier in the computer science career pipeline, only 33% of students who took the AP Computer Science exam were female in 2020, showing that the gender divide is already present in high school (Code.org, 2021b). Despite these trends, research shows that providing students early exposure to computer science helps improve the gender gaps and overall diversity in tech fields (Bers, 2018; Jungert et al., 2018; Sullivan & Bers, 2016). By providing students with early exposure to computational thinking, schools can create opportunities for them to enter this growing field.

Beyond career preparedness, there are several reasons why it is important for early elementary students to learn how to code. Early coding exposure can help attract students from historically underrepresented backgrounds to engage in STEM, by building comfort with engineering concepts and helping young children, and especially girls, to picture themselves as future engineers and software developers (Jungert et al., 2018; Sullivan & Bers, 2018). Additionally, engaging with computers can help children develop a deeper understanding of their own learning, by asking them to examine their thought processes as they are instructing the computer (Papert, 1980). Studying computer science has also been shown to improve elementary student’s performance in other subjects and strengthen their problem-solving abilities (Code.org, 2020). Finally, learning to code builds up computational thinking skills, which are transferrable far beyond programming, and include practices that are especially crucial for early elementary students (Bers, 2018; Yadav et al., 2016). I will spend this chapter exploring how to teach computational thinking to young children through programming and discuss the importance of these skills outside the realm of code.