Get Your Kids Excited In Programming

Programming is becoming increasingly important in today’s world. Just about everything around us functions with the help of a program. With the rise of the 4th Industrial Revolution, AI and data & analytics, programming is becoming ever more important. This is changing the dynamics of the job market, making many jobs require some form of coding knowledge. This might be a major reason why you might want your child to learn how to program. However, they might not want to learn programming due to a lack of interest. Not to worry, because there are many ways to work around this though.

Getting involved in your child’s programming education is one of the most effective ways to get them interested in programming. There is a compilation of 50 studies done by researchers that show that family involvement/engagement is related to student academic achievement. Parents can get involved by asking children about what they learned, about how their learning process is going, what their likes and dislikes in the course are, helping them understand and remember the work, giving them additional resources to improve their performance, communicating with their teachers and tutors, and helping them set goals and showing them how to reach them. This makes the child feel supported and lets them know that they are not alone. It also gives them a sense of belief and boosts their self-confidence, which translates to better performance.

Showing your kids what they can do with programming is probably the most effective way to get them interested in programming. Visualisation stimulates the part of our brain that is responsible for carrying out movement and performing activities. This means that through physically seeing the outcomes of programming, your child will be able to register in their brain that they will be able to create those same programs in the future. With our programming courses at Itgenio, students are able to create phone/tablet games, Playstation/Xbox games, animations, develop cell phone applications, build websites, automated systems and more. Could sound exciting to them, or appeal to their curiosity. You can kick start this process by showing them what students in our coding school have created here.

Remind them of the bigger picture. This method would work more with older kids, particularly from the age of 14. Reminding your children that programming is the pathway to the career they want in the future or an entry point into the university of their choice, could help motivate them to get interested in using programming to their advantage. “Linking school up with their long-term goals can make the work feel more personally fulfilling,” says Laura Phillips, PsyD, a neuropsychologist at the Child Mind Institute.

Let your kids play programming games. “What’s really motivating about a good learning game is the learning,” explains Louisa Rosenheck, researcher at MIT’s Education Arcade Lab and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She says that good educational games use a concept called gamification, which uses irrelevant components such as points, badges and leaderboards to make the learning experience more desirable. These ingredients serve to trick the child into learning without them even knowing it. Some of the best programming games for kids include CodeMonkey, Lightbot, Tynker and CodeCombat.

Give your child a balance between learning and fun. Giving your child a good balance between learning and fun can help them be more open to learning new courses. This can be achieved by giving them breaks in between learning, getting them engaged in sports, and giving them some play time. This will help their minds create a link between learning and having fun, helping them to understand from a very young age that there is a time for everything and that work and rest go hand in hand.

Group learning may also help get your child interested in programming. A study involving 4 000 children aged between 5 and 14 found that children progress quicker and behave better when working in groups. They also tend to enjoy themselves more as they get to interact with other children and get to be part of a group working together towards an important goal.

At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to persuade your child to take interest in programming. This probably accounts for 50% or maybe even less of whether your child is interested in it or not. The other 50% has to come from them – you cannot force your child to have an interest in a particular topic, it will have to naturally come from them.

Luckily at Itgenio we have a wide array of programming courses from which your child can choose to do a free trial class. Simply click here to get started!