Coding for Kids
How Learning to Code Can Improve Math Scores
By adding coding across the curriculum with Tynker, Jenny Anderson, a STEM specialist at a magnet elementary school in Southern California, increased her students’ math scores and targeted girls in 3rd and 4th grades to increase their interest in STEM. Now her school is being used as the model for other schools across the district on how to transform the curriculum to incorporate 21st century skills while bolstering traditional subjects like Math and English. In an Edutopia article, Mrs. Anderson explains what made her school’s coding program so successful and so transformative.
Coding, according to Mrs. Anderson, has been instrumental in helping her students develop key skills like problem solving and critical thinking. These broad skill sets and ways of breaking down and analyzing problems translate across the curriculum and are particularly helpful in math. In the three years that Casita Center, Mrs. Anderson’s school, has been teaching coding, they’ve seen considerable improvements in their students’ math scores, outperforming virtually all California schools with similar demographics. Mrs. Anderson believes this improvement is due to the effectiveness of their CS program. When kids learn to code, they practice algorithmic and computational thinking–and when they learn to code with Tynker, they have fun at the same time, so they’re more likely to stay engaged with the material.
Even if your child isn’t learning to code at school, they can still see the benefits of coding and computational thinking. Tynker is ideal for home environments because kids can learn to code at their own pace as they program games and apps, control drones, and even mod Minecraft.
Parents of kids who code with Tynker have also noticed improvements in their kids’ math abilities. Thomas, father of 11-year-old Tynkerer Benji, says that coding has produced a significant change in Benji’s math abilities, even though Benji just feels like he’s making and playing games when he uses Tynker: “One of the things [Benji] was having a problem with was math, so having to do the math involved in making a game and adding a score, multiplying for points, and different things like that, I think it’s helped him a lot.”
If your child hasn’t started coding yet, now is a great time to start!
