Why Coding Is Your Child’s Key to Unlocking the Future

WSJ ^ | 4/29/2015 | CHRISTOPHER MIMS

[Borges]

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg.

You are “Gunman Taco Truck.”

“It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game.

And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for Mac, PC, iOS and Android, and may also arrive on consoles. It’s quite an outcome for something born of Saturday programming lessons with Donovan’s dad John, also a videogame designer of note.

Donovan’s situation—access to two parents who are both programmers—is rare. In fact, in record numbers, children are picking up a skill their parents don’t possess: coding.

[SpinnerWebb]

I thought there was a misspelling and the article was about coddling our children.

That happens. See mine from yesterday here

[discostu]

It’s kind of panacea thinking. Yes learning procedural thinking is good for a kid, probably the most important thing a kid can learn really. But there’s tons of way to learn that. Used to be math was the big place for that. Also all those, now considered evil, “gender” skill one learns in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, all that cooking, building, cleaning, and knotting is procedural. I suppose in a world with a computer in every house and a software professional in half of them coding seems like a good bet, but I certainly wouldn’t call it “the key”, just one of the many paths which will work for some kids and others won’t be interested. That’s really “the key” figure out what kind of procedural thing your kid is interested in and teach them that, because once they learn to think they’ve learned to think.

[justlurking]

Better check with the kid. They might have been his ideas.

Since the child is only 10, that's not likely.

The boy in the article is actually his step-son. Romero and the boy's mother were engaged and married in 2012.

[AppyPappy]

I’m still maintaining C batch programs. They were written when COBOL was “too slow and heavy”. Now, of course, it doesn’t matter.
The problem is that things change too fast. We are developing in Groovy/Grails to get ready for our Enterprise system conversion and they may drop Grails.
Note: I started on a Burroughs 6800 if that tells you anything.
The other day, a young coder told me he can’t mimic the existing code in Javascript to which I replied “You realize that the existing system is written in Javascript, right?”. Nope, still can’t do it.

[CJ Wolf]

“If you don’t invest your own time in developing new skills and keeping up with the rapid changes in technology, you’ll slide to the bottom of the bell curve and be “eased out””

That is true. Former COBOL programmer here.

[dfwgator]

Yep, I go to the book websites, like Manning and O’Reilly and order the latest eBooks in order to learn about the new technologies.

[marktwain]

I suspect that coding is very useful to petroleum engineers.

It was to me when I got my Masters in mining engineering..

[martin_fierro]

lol

[Mr. Jeeves]

Eventually coding will become just a part of a bigger job. Just like Financial Analysts become proficient at writing Excel Macros.

Exactly, and it's already happening. The day of the IT specialist is rapidly drawing to a close.

[AppyPappy]

Actually, COBOL is still in demand. I get frequent offers to do contract work in COBOL. But that could be driven by my experience in other languages(Java, Groovy, PL/SQL, PHP, etc).
I could retire and just write PL/SQL API’s until I die.

[McGruff]

The kid's father is John Romero. He was co-founder of id Software, who created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake.

Kid won the lottery as far as a father. I didn't but am doing pretty well for myself as a auto mechanic turned software engineer. Doing things I can't talk about.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Coding is not for everyone. It takes a certain type of tenacity and patience. Not everyone is going to be cut out for that.

Me, for example. One class in Java was enough to convince me I’d never want to do this for a living.

Ohhhhh....I left the semi-colon out on line 476....THAT’S why it won’t compile! Could not see that being my daily routine.

[justlurking]

The day of the IT specialist is rapidly drawing to a close.

That's a good point: as tools become more effective and easier to use, more and more people will be able to use existing programs to do their jobs. Look at how Excel has replaced a lot of "data processing" systems.

There are still systems that require an engineer's mindset to design, implement, test, and maintain. But, most professionals are able to cobble together much of what they need, with a minimal amount of coding.

But as the article notes: the procedural skills you have to learn to write code are also usable elsewhere. Programmers know how to integrate different components together to accomplish the requirement, without starting from scratch. But, you do the same thing solving any problem -- from when you first pick up the right tool.

[Vroomfondel]

Note: I started on a Burroughs 6800 if that tells you anything.

It tells me you'd rather be using Algol.

[TXnMA]

Note the equipment in the article's photo...

But, I do question the wisdom of blocking airflow with that "Taco Truck" model -- even if it is only for a photo op.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Looks like (at 77) it is time for me to teach myself yet another coding language.

If that kid can learn it... '-)

[Borges]

Or just shrinking. You’ll always need specialists but they will be working for consulting firms that come in fix something and leave.

[rey]

Right, but the article talked about games, not other real applications.

There are a lot of coding classes here, but most of them are how to use coding programs to manipulate games. None talk about the math behind coding. I ask what math should we be studying to understand these programs more fully and the instructors are at a loss for an answer (maybe somebody here can). I’d enroll my girl in a coding or programming class that discussed at least some aspect of the math rather than how to use a program that somebody else wrote. She loves that stupid DS, but that is only games. We went to the store to get some math games for it and sadly there were only a couple and they were very low level math (how to count and add). I know the guys that write these programs are smarter than that and can write a math game, but they don’t. Obviously there is no market value.

[Steve_Seattle]

"That is true. Former COBOL programmer here."

One of the curses of modernity is that in any tech field you've got to be re-learning everything every five to ten years. The field is littered with obsolete computer programming languages and technologies. One year Bernoulli boxes (remember them?) were the big thing, five years later they were obsolete. And that process gets repeated over and over.

It used to be that you could learn a profession once and then basically do the same thing for the next thirty years, with a couple of tweaks every now and then. Now, the re-learning is almost constant.

[ItsOurTimeNow]

>>No, training in the skilled trades like troubleshooting a circuit on the burned out control panel of a robot or repairing the hardware in a server farm, if not being a plumber or mechanic is what will guarantee your child a job.<<

+1 - well said!

[huldah1776]

I know, just “kidding”