As I have been trying to promote teaching students programming skills, I was interested in a Twitter chat on that topic that was scheduled for today. I asked the hosts of the chat if they would mind if my 4th graders joined in, and they were thrilled to have some kids give their opinions about programming. Some of the questions were, “What do you like most about programming?” “What is the hardest thing about programming?” “What age do you think children should start learning to program?”
Interestingly, we hadn’t had a chance to work on our programming lesson for the day before we did the chat. So, the majority of the students seemed to feel that programming needed to be learned at age 8 and up; some felt that it shouldn’t be learned until college. After we did some work with the “Daisy the Dinosaur” app this afternoon, I asked the age question again, and most of them agreed that kids as young as 4 or 5 could certainly be introduced to basic programming skills.
Even though “Daisy” is a pretty basic intro, the students made a lot of connections to systems thinking, and it was a good foundation for getting the idea of what programming was all about.
Today’s pictures were taken by David, our 4th grade photographer, as students worked on the Daisy app.