Computers are an important part of the world we live in. Technology is everywhere and it is advancing at a rapid rate, which means children are going to have to learn to interact with it at a younger age. While other generations didn’t have a cellphone until they were a teenager, that is no longer the social norm. More than likely, your kids are going to use a smart phone to make a call or watch a video at a very young age. Because they are being introduced to technology at a younger age, they should also be introduced to concepts like coding at a young age. What Should Kids Learn Growing Up? There are a lot of debates about…

Second in a pretty loose series based around why I think that coding is a necessary skill for kids to learn as they grow (ideally starting in Primary school). In an era of increasingly fast technological innovation and change, there is a growing necessity for people not only to know how to use the connected world (being anything from computers, programmable devices, drones, the IoT etc etc), but also to understand how to utilise all of these things in new, innovative, untested and unusual ways. With this new necessity in mind, coding should become as basic as reading and writing, and be treated as such in school curriculums the world over. As a father of a daughter and a son…

Next week my daughters turn five. They are growing up in a radically different world to the one I knew when I was a kid. I was one of the generation inspired by the first wave of home computers: I taught myself to program on a ZX81, then a BBC Micro. Those early computers were glacially slow, had almost no storage and you had to write code to get them to do even the simplest task. Today, I have a computer in my pocket that is more than 100,000 times faster and has 10,000,000 times more memory than a ZX81. It is connected to every other computer on the planet and can access virtually every piece of human knowledge ever…