Why All Nigerian Schools Should Introduce Coding Into Their Curiculum

Starting early is ideal. It's beneficial for children to begin learning the fundamentals of programming at a young age. This could lead to the creation of IT experts and entrepreneurs, contributing to our country's economy through foreign exchange. This aspect shouldn't be neglected in our educational system, as many successful IT entrepreneurs and programmers began their journey at a young age. By integrating this into our curriculum, we could witness a surge in startup ventures in our country in the coming years. The entire world is interconnected through the internet, which relies on programming languages for configuration and communication among networks and devices.

Education Beyond Reading and Writing

Young figures like Elon Musk, who is currently the world's wealthiest individual and a programmer, and Bill Gates, renowned for Microsoft Windows, are examples. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is another. These individuals all started learning programming at a young age. The sooner our children are exposed to coding, the better. As a saying goes on national television, today's education goes beyond traditional reading and writing; it involves learning to code.

Let's Incorporate Coding Habit

Coding is essentially a language. For years, we've incorporated Verbal and Quantitative reasoning into our educational system to help students grasp the English and Mathematics codes. We can apply the same approach to coding. Let's encourage our children to explore the basics of programming languages like learning about various HTML tags for web design or explaining different JavaScript functions through visual examples. These activities will enhance their understanding of coding. Primary students should be introduced to Scratch, a coding and animation program developed by the MIT Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group in the USA. This software is designed to help children understand the foundational concepts of programming. For secondary students, they should learn the basic web languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Additionally, they could be introduced to other Object-Oriented Programming languages.