Coding isn’t so much the indispensable career tool of tomorrow as today’s seemingly essential-at-all-ages new little brother reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools the world over have begun instructing tots who occasionally still struggle with “Don’t put things up your nose…or others’ noses” in the foundational principles of software development.
That leads parents and teachers alike to wonder, how early should we be teaching the next generation responsible for creating cutting-edge mobile apps and, hopefully, a decent SONIC THE HEDGEHOG game that HTML is magic?
Fisher-Price has a conveniently suspect answer: pre-school. While we aren’t exactly sure of the threshold for successfully turning tiny people no taller than our kneecaps into burgeoning code monkeys, we can only applaud the Think & Learn Code-a-Pillar for aiming high in terms of introducing basic problem solving concepts.
Taking its bow this February at Toy Fair, the Code-a-Pillar’s mechanized movements vary depending on the sequence of directional and action command body segments a child arranges. Swapping sections in and out is designed to cement an early understanding of how ordering commands can change outcomes. It’s an introduction to the basic rules that govern even more complex programming languages, but a free companion app offers some stepping stones in the form of further programming challenges to test a child’s comprehension with age.
Source – Gizmodo
