You might be wondering what coding has to do with resilience. Let us tell you this⏤learning to code is a fantastic way to gain soft skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, persistence, and especially resilience, because the process of learning to code requires children to apply more than just algorithms and logical and computational thinking.
What is Resilience?
According to Merriam Webster,1 resilience is “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” In simple terms, resilience is an individual’s capacity to cope with, adapt to, and recover from situations of distress and adversity. This capacity varies from child to child or even person to person and is influenced by a lot of factors, such as social, biological, and environmental influences.
A healthy dose of perseverance is generally required to complete any task. This is especially true when it comes to learning something as detailed as coding. While children learn new skills every day, it is also important for them to learn additional skills, or soft skills, that are required in addition to learning acquired skills. This is because skills such as resilience are often not taught in a typical classroom setting, but are a natural by-product of the learning process.
Coding is a great way to practice perseverance and develop resilience while doing so, as children learn these critical skills to bounce back from frustrations and setbacks. Between attempting and completing projects, children can use coding as a tool to learn perseverance and resilience, which will help them pursue their goals.
In recent years, most people have recognized coding and computer literacy as important parts of education for many young learners. Though it is often overlooked, teaching young children to code comes with many benefits, such as learning to cope with stress through problem-solving, creativity, and computational thinking. It also provides them with a structure to foster their persistence, communication, and collaboration skills by guiding them through exercises that teach them a variety of coping skills.
How Does Learning to Code Help Children Develop Essential Skills Like Resilience?
Now, let’s look at how coding can help kids acquire these skills.
- Coding Teaches Children That Failure is Part of Learning
While most children are aware that success is something to strive for, it is unfortunate that many children associate failure with something negative. Teaching children that it’s okay to fail is essential for their growth and development.
This essential understanding can be taught naturally to children when they are learning to code, as they learn and understand that their ideas may not work on the very first go, but with continuous effort and improvement, with tweaking here and there, they can eventually succeed and see their project work. However, to do that, they must first fail, and understand that failure is a part of learning and that with every failure, they need to get right back up and keep trying to succeed.
- Children Learn the Importance of Perseverance
Giving up is very easy when something does not work out at the first attempt or the way we envisioned. Children learning to code learn the importance of never giving up. No matter how many times they have to try again, they need to keep going. Sometimes a code may work, and sometimes it may not, or a certain algorithm will not do what the child intended for it to do. Perseverance, continuous effort, and learning through mistakes are all part of a learning experience that will make children stronger.
Trial and error learning means attempting to reach a solution in several ways until they find the correct responses. This knowledge serves as real-life learning to understand that problems, no matter how small or big in life, have multiple solutions, and it will eventually make children more positive and resilient.
- Children Learn to Accept Criticism
The ability to receive constructive criticism is transcendental to success. It is important to make sure children have a space where they feel safe and comfortable so that they are free to share ideas and accept criticism. Accepting criticism and learning from it is an important life skill for everybody.
It is not easy to listen when somebody criticizes your work or your manner of working. However, listening to, accepting, and learning from it is essential for growth. Many times, people take criticism personally, which can impair their growth, so by helping children learn to accept criticism constructively, learning to code can help them turn it around in a manner that will help them succeed.
With every piece of feedback, there is more room for improvement. We do this by providing specific and helpful feedback to create a positive change and better learning. We believe it is through constructive criticism that children grow with their interaction with those around them, learn how to deliver constructive criticism while also learning to receive it graciously with no feeling of defeat.
- Children Learn Problem-Solving While Learning to Code
While it’s important to encourage children to ask any number of questions, it is important to help children think and troubleshoot problems by themselves. Much like learning any other skill, problem solving and creativity are important while learning to code.
Children who learn to code learn to solve problems and troubleshoot on their own, as well as learning to develop their own unique techniques and solutions, explore ideas for their projects, and express themselves creatively.
This is an essential part of development because learning to rely on oneself in the face of adversity is not only a valuable lesson during coding lessons, but it is also an essential life skill that teaches children resilience.
Apart from the above-said things, one of the most important ways in which coding teaches children resilience is by helping them build self-confidence.
Children become confident in their ideas and actions when they learn to code, as it helps them to be resilient when other people question their ideas or outcomes. This self-confidence helps children in attempting to persevere through any challenge they come across, whether in their coding classes, school, while participating in any sport or in any other aspect of their lives.
At BYJU’S FutureSchool, we understand the importance of persistence, patience, and resilience. Therefore, we encourage our students to never give up while helping them come up with various ideas and solutions using various methodologies and an out-of-the-box curriculum.
Our goal is to help our students not only to fall in love with learning, but also to ensure they achieve outstanding success in their coding courses, and grow up to be successful and resilient individuals capable of accomplishing anything they set their minds to.
References:
- Resilience Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Retrieved March 24, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resilience
Schedule a free class