Arkansas Matters – More schools are including “coding” in their curriculum, and the students are younger than ever.
Nine-year-old Isabelle Visser loves to “play” on the computer, but her classwork is no ordinary game. She is learning how to code!
“There’s a bunch of characters and you learn how to speak a different language in computer,” she says.
Her classmate Sophia agrees, coding is pretty cool.
“It’s fun and hard sometimes, but it’s mostly fun,” says fellow third grader Sophia Puente.
Both girls are part of an after-school coding club.
“Coding” is the act of programming a computer, and telling it what to do.
Jey Veerasamy, Ph.D., started the program a few years ago, and says elementary school is the best time to start exposing kids to coding.
“They’re not afraid to try. They’re not afraid to fail,” says the Coding Club founder and Senior Lecturer of the Dept. of Computer Science at UT-Dallas.
To continue reading the article by Mallory Brooks, as well as to view the interview with Dr. Veerasamy, Click Here.
Source | Arkansas Matters
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 1,600 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,100 master’s students, 160 PhD students, and 80 faculty members, as of Fall 2015. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.
