Children today grow up surrounded by technology. While they are familiar with how to use technology, it is still important to help promote problem-solving skills for students and creativity so that we can help the future generation face new problems and opportunities that arise in our new technological society. 

By implementing computational thinking into our curriculum at a younger age at Kodely , we start to encourage children to boost their creativity, enhance their problem-solving and decision-making skills, and encourage future innovation.

Reasons Your Child Should Focus on Computational Thinking:

• Better Problem-Solving and Decision Making Skills 

Computational thinking, at its simplest, is analyzing a problem by breaking it down, finding similarities, detecting errors, and simplifying the problem using relevant information to find the best solution. 

How do we implement these in the classroom, however?

Some small examples of computational thinking in the classroom are giving kids a recipe or a set of instructions that isn’t entirely correct and trying to think of which step things may go wrong or giving children directions to follow from one point on a map to another. Half of the task of solving a problem is thoroughly understanding it. With these methods, kids can tackle a problem with confidence.

• Boosts Creativity 

Computational thinking can encourage students to become more creative by transforming us “from consumers of technology to producers.” For example. rather than just having students play video games, having them explore how the game design process works and introducing them to storyboarding their own games opens up their eyes to new possibilities.

When we give children in the classroom more than one way to solve a problem, we help them open doors to finding different ways to arrive at a solution, improve their creative problem-solving skills. 

• Encourage future innovation 

When children are able to solve problems in new ways, they can grow up to innovate new possibilities. While it is important to introduce digital literacy in a world where technology has become the norm, it also helps children take that a step further. When children are able to break problems down and bring in this new skill set they learned, they can start to think outside the box at a younger age. 

Explore ways that you can introduce computational thinking at your school and to your students by partnering with Kodely.