Teaching Kids Tech Skills

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With the tech job market growing, some educators and industry analysts wonder if we are preparing our kids for this new workplace reality. Many schools across the U.S. are having Hour of Code events, where they take 60 minutes out of a day for students to learn to write computer commands.

In Rochester, Minnesota, 25 teams with 153 students built robots to battle it out. The event was sponsored by IBM, and the purpose was to show kids that coding can be fun.

Some say the push for coding in schools is simply a ploy by large tech companies to make money, get future customers early in their lives, or get tax breaks.

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As we watch our world change from a manufacturing society to an information society, we need to take a long look at how we are preparing our kids to make a living once they get out of the K-12 or K-20 education system.

We have a generation of digital natives that are already starting the enter the workplace. They don’t really know lives without a smartphone, tablet, and other digital tools that allow them to access all the information in the world.

But what about coding? Should coding be mandatory? Some people say that there should be some mandatory level of coding taught in schools.

It seems that the line between coding and tech jobs gets blurred. There are a vast number of new economy jobs that involve using programs and apps written by other people. To be sure, kids who are interested in learning the inner workings of how technology works should be given every opportunity to do so. But for the rest of them, they should be guided by teachers who are versed in the best ways to integrate tech into the classroom to prepare kids for life in the information age.

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