Critical thinking and its correlation with coding logic
Critical thinking and its correlation with coding logic in a child's mental development
Critical thinking is one of the important soft skills necessary for all walks of life, personal and professional. Coding is an essential technical skill required to build an effective and high-performance career. The correlation of these two skills plays a vital role in building your child’s mental and emotional health and in their career path.
What is Critical Thinking?
Ask your child to balance a plastic ruler on top of a water bottle. Your child places the ruler in different positions till it stops falling and stays balanced on top of the bottle. How did your child find the right position to balance the scale? He/she did by observing the change in position and its effect on the balance. They observed the action, captured the data and then made judgement based on their observations and effects to come find the correct balance position. This is critical thinking.
It applies in almost all types of decision making that we do in our lives, from shopping to cooking and even choosing a career path.
What’s the relationship between coding and critical thinking?
Though one is technical and the other is a soft skill, coding and critical thinking involve similar approaches:
Identify: What is the problem? What do we need to do? What is expected?
Analysis: What are the resources available? What are the options that I have? What can I do? What method can I use? What coding methods/languages can I use?
Hypothesis: Will this method work? What is the initial solution? Which resources will be helpful? What are the options that are applicable to this situation? Will this algorithm give the result?
Testing: Applying the hypothesized methods/resources/algorithms till the solution is obtained.
Repeat: Check again to see if the method/code is successful
How coding and critical thinking help improve your child’s mental development?
As a parent, your focus is to build a strong foundation for your child’s life. So, you will definitely focus on skills that will help your child in the future. Coding and critical thinking are two skills that will help your child in every way. Learning these skills from an early age will also help improve your child’s mental development.
Mistakes are not failures
One of the most important lessons of life is that mistakes don’t make us failures. We can make mistakes and learn from them to become better humans and better coders. It’s possible to make mistakes while writing a program. The fact is that if the program doesn’t run, we can go back to check the code and make the corrections. The same applies to the decisions that we make in life. We can always take a different turn and change our life for the better. Critical thinking helps us observe ourselves and our environment and make the best decisions based on our experience.
Innovative problem solving
Coding teaches us that there are different ways of solving a problem. So, if we are stuck in one way, we can find a different solution to the problem. This attitude will help build confidence and self-worth in your child. They will understand that a problem is not the end of life, but a chance to learn something or try a different method.
There’s more than one right answer
Telling a child that there is only one right answer, one solution or one method greatly limits your child’s development. Coding shows that there are numerous windows of opportunities that can help you reach your goal. When your child is not limited, he/she will explore the world to find new ways of learning and growing. It greatly helps improve your child’s mental and emotional development.
Conclusion
Coding is not just related to computers and critical thinking is not just limited to professional work environments. Cultivating these skills early in life can help your child become a more self-reliant, confident and energetic person who is ready to take the world by storm when they get older.