The Wall Street Journal is running an article, How Wooden Toys Teach Kids to Code, that posits that some forms of manipulative play (meaning they manipulate physical objects, not their parents) help kids prepare for coding.
It's a topic I'm interested in because teaching middle school and high school level coding it's clear that many kids could benefit from earlier exposure to some of the concepts. Imagine if we taught no math, not even counting, until high school. Just think of how overwhelming their first math class would be in the 9th grade. Some kids would intuitively grasp some of the concepts, but others...who might have been strong math students had they built up to it more slowly...would feel lost and discouraged.
That's pretty much what happens when we don't teach any programming or computational thinking until they are teenagers. That doesn't mean they have to be writing recursive functions at 6 years old, but neither do we have them dividing fractions or factoring quadratics in elementary school. Instead we get them used to thinking in numbers and the four basic operations so that when they start doing "math" they're facile in the fundamental concepts and language.
We need a K-12 computational thinking curriculum that takes the same deliberate...and patient...approach to coding.
Getting back to the WSJ article, I'm curious if the article's suppositions are correct, that playing with these sorts of toys help prepare kids for coding. For my part I'm an owner of Robot Turtles, and I've also pre-ordered (my bad, I mean "backed") the Kickstarter project Cubetto. I'd like to believe the underlying assumption is true, but I'd also like to see some intentional research.
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