One of the ambitions of this website is to let students find an pursue that which interests them in their own time. Those who only think and write and read in the space allocated by a bell in a classroom miss what it is to find and pursue a passion.
Literacy is the most important subject. Without it we have passive receptors of content at best, and unable to access any of the imaginative world around us at worst. It takes many forms: grammatical; numerical; digital and so on.
Coding is a form of literacy that empowers any student in the near future. It captures the mind and breaks down the seemingly miraculous glowing flat screen that connects me and you to so much more than we can be alone. It makes us realise that in technology we possess (often from the phones in our pockets) the means to access the sum total of human knowledge. Too often that is used for (just) finding funny videos about cats.
For those students who have requested it, and for anyone else who happily stumbles across this post, I introduce http://code.org/
That website allows the self-study of computer programming. I intend to spread it amongst my students and to see what response it garners. The argument often given such things, though, is that the teaching of digital literacy is not about enrichment – it is about entitlement.
