Coding and the 21st century skills:

Coding helps kids develop academically, build perseverance and organization, and skills that are essential to build up later in their career life. Coding is also important in building 21st century skills in children.

Some of the 21st century skills include critical thinking, communication skills, creativity, problem solving, perseverance, collaboration, and social skills. This type of skills refers to knowledge, life and career skills, and other skills that are essential for the success of children today and in the future.

The 10 main reasons why children should learn how to code:

1.       Writing: Coding helps children understand the value of briefness and organization that leads to enhanced writing skills. Some kids use WonderEd as a medium for storytelling!
2.       Creativity: Children are scientists; they learn through experimentation. They even experiment and explore around to identify their senses. Coding helps children strengthen their brains and boost their creativity.
3.       Confidence: Coding boosts children’s confidence as they build on their problem-solving skills.
4.       Self-esteem: During coding, children perceive what they are able to do and explore their capabilities, in addition to their boosted confidence. This will let them feel proud of themselves and increase their self-esteem.
5.       Concentration and Perseverance: Coding requires a lot of mental effort as in perseverance, concentration, and practice. That is accomplished when the young coders are breaking down complex tasks to simple ones in order to resolve them and write codes and algorithms.
6.       Resilience: Working in challenges, failures, and trials until the coders succeed is what builds resilience in the young coders.
7.       Communication: The young coders learn logical communication, as they are strengthening both their verbal, nonverbal, and written skills. Little do they know they are learning a wholly new language!
8.       Computational and Problem-solving: Coding improves computational thinking, which includes decomposing complex problems into simpler ones, connecting between similar problems and experience, thinking abstractly, and identifying algorithms.
9.       Critical thinking: Wondering about what their computational and problem-solving skills have built and questioning everything that is explained to the young coders is critical thinking. Developing critical thinking is the ability to express their own vision and opinion about different topics.

10.   Collaboration and teamwork: When people hear the words “coding” and “programming”, the first thing that pops up in their minds is a presentation of a child in front of a computer. However, many collaborative projects can be accomplished through programming. In fact, at Wondered we teach children coding through storytelling, games, competitions and much more.