The ability to program is as important as the ability to read. These are the demands of the market and the new world.

Why programming has become part of the new literacy

Computer literacy skills help anyone solve everyday and professional tasks. According to research, programming stimulates creative thinking and builds learning skills.

There are two stages in the history of literacy:

• In the first stage, texts become part of the infrastructure. They occupy a central place in people's lives. Text has been used as a tool to create laws and develop strategies. This is especially true of land laws, which began to take the form of written texts instead of personal testimonies.
• In the second stage, text became an integral part of everyday life. Thanks to massive literacy campaigns beginning in the nineteenth century, most people mastered the skills of writing and reading. Literacy helped access information in newspapers with descriptions of events, in pamphlets with recommendations for farmers, and in bills to keep track of debts. The more people mastered reading and writing skills, the more widespread literacy had to become.

The same stages can be discerned in the development of computer literacy, only the development takes place over decades rather than centuries.

First, computers become part of the infrastructure when they are used by the government for census purposes. Universities, airlines and the banking sector began using computers in the 1950s. Around the 1980s, computers became available to most people, and knowledge about computers began to permeate the lives of ordinary people from the knowledge domains of narrow specialists. People were more likely to use computers when contacting hospitals, organizing government data and managing education.

Then computers became part of life. The ability to write a simple program or code gradually became a basic skill. Programming and computational thinking are empowering and become a requirement for anyone from a physicist to a journalist. The ability to read and code courses online is becoming more in demand, so programming is moving from special knowledge to universal literacy. It is the literacy of using modern tools of communication and work - computers. And if this is an aspect of literacy, it needs to be developed from childhood.

How programming teaches problem solving

Programming develops computational thinking. It's a set of techniques for solving problems in computer science, but applicable in any field. For example, computational science helps in education. A special platform collects data about students' activities. With the data, the instructor tracks ineffective assignments to create a new curriculum.

Computational thinking teaches how to formulate a problem, look for a solution, and analyze it. Programming is part of computational thinking and the most effective way to master it. For example, before programming, we analyze and break down the problem into subtasks. Programming concretizes computational thinking and can be a tool for gaining knowledge.

Why teach children to program

Constructivist pedagogical ideologist Jean Piaget proposed this idea: children learn faster when they form their own ideas about what they see and draw their own conclusions, not when they are told how they should perceive the world. Children are not passive recipients of knowledge, but on the contrary, they construct it themselves.

Effective learning occurs when the student creates an object that is meaningful to him, whether it is a sand castle or a theory. Constructionism combines two types of construction: children construct things in the real world and construct new ideas in their heads. The two types of construction create a continuous learning spiral: when children have new ideas, they construct new things in the real world. Programming helps children bring these ideas to life.

Through programming, a child develops computational thinking. Computational thinking helps children develop problem solving skills, creative thinking, learning skills, and teamwork skills.

Develops problem-solving skills

Programming and computational thinking help children learn networking skills: chatting, video conferencing, and social networking. When solving complex problems, children use the four basic components of computational thinking: decomposition, pattern selection, automation, and abstraction.

Teaching children programming is not about making them programmers in the future. The task of programming is to prepare children for computational thinking, which will help them confidently cope with the complex problems of the 21st century, which have no one-size-fits-all solution.