How Coding Improves Critical Thinking
Coding is a great tool and can help you improve many different 21st-century skills, which are very important and necessary for children.
One of the most important ones is critical thinking. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of skillfully conceptualising, applying, analysing and evaluating information gathered from observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication as a guide to understanding and action.
In coding, you have to visualise and create map minds of your task or issue and break down the problem into smaller and more manageable parts, so that you can solve them more effectively and efficiently. This is natural and important when solving a problem. At the same time, in programming, because some bugs or errors are hidden from your sight, you have to break down the code, line by line, to find your problem and fix it.
This important step in critical thinking which you can learn while coding, can be applied to all situations and problems aside from coding.
Coding also teaches you to optimise your code to run faster and more efficiently; having fewer lines of code for the same solution is always beneficial. And again, just like breaking down the problem, optimisation can be used everywhere to make something get done faster and better.
Another essential thing coding can introduce to children is that an error made from a mistake does not mean failure; it’s just another way NOT to solve the issue.
It also teaches children to use multiple solutions for one solution or problem, so the most efficient one can be used (as said before, optimisation is very important in coding). You can use some aspects of different solutions to solve a different problem because you gain experience from practising and seeing different ways to solve similar issues.
So overall, coding includes the same process as critical thinking, and that of critical thinking process can be used very well and effectively in coding.
