The growing literacy of coding

The importance of computer science education is everywhere you look, whether it’s boot camps that retrain blue-collar workers as a hedge against their jobs’ looming automation, or guidance counsellors who advise students on the highest-paying majors, or even children in primary school creating book reports in augmented reality. Learning to program is hard, but is increasingly important for obtaining skilled positions in the workforce.

Information about what it takes to be good at programming is critically missing in a field that has been notoriously slow in closing the gender gap. Be it honing creativity along with computational skills amongst learners, motivating them to innovate, or making them future-ready, programming is all about empowering learners and introducing it in schools can transform learners’ future.

Coding and coding literacy can be argued to be one of the most important skills for current and future generations to learn in today’s time. Many have argued that it should form part of a national curriculum on par with a native language, the sciences and math. Code is the language of the modern world. Whether it’s the app that brings emails to a mobile or the car that knows how many miles to go until refuelling.

Any smart device needs code instructions to tell it how to operate and communicate with the outside world. As a result of this, as a profession is gaining momentum, and an increasing number of professionals from diverse backgrounds are now breaking into the tech ecosystem.

The core competencies of today have energised the audience, involving students and even the working professionals to switch to code. Almost every sector of the economy has adapted this technology because the advancing era requires this field of study as the only option that will sustain. The involvement of Machine Learning (a subset of Artificial Intelligence) in the current pace of technology has given the economy a major push to make things or theories better in terms of productivity.

The economy today has started adapting ways to balance these technologies in their lives. It is vastly reliant on computer programming because the technologies that we are surrounded with such as mobile devices and computers sustaining over the internet uses n number of software and each requires a code.

During Microsoft CEO’s recent visit to India, he said that coding is like poetry, a compact expression that can be the most liberating. Everyone should learn coding irrespective of whether they are studying computer science, history or literature. It is a core skill and a malleable, changeable resource for the future.

Just the way how working professionals grew or even upskilled with time, schools, colleges and even the universities started building students for the better world of tomorrow. The process of how the brain becomes an expert in such terminologies pertaining to coding and transitioning into automation is all about the basics, stage one of coding.

Social media platform LinkedIn said that skills such as mobile development and user interface design will be in high demand in the near future. Therefore, it is imperative to design an academic curriculum tailored to meet the needs of the future generation and make them IT fluent.

Recently, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has rolled out a national initiative for technical teachers training, the courses include orientation towards technical education and curriculum aspects, professional ethics and sustainability, communication skills, modes and knowledge dissemination, instructional planning and delivery, technology-enabled learning, lifelong self-learning, student assessment and evaluation, creative problem solving, innovation, institutional management and administrative procedures.

Coding is one skill that is future proof when joining hands with ML. As per a report by Mckinsey Global Institute, AI and ML will automate around 400-800 million jobs and 40-160 million working women may need a transition of jobs by the year 2030. Another report by Glassdoor states that almost eight out of 25 jobs are based on tech and this is just the start.

Besides, the mass has started accepting this transition phase as more and more workers are deciding to learn to code, the number being 23 million at the moment, it will reach to almost 28 million within the span of five years. The world has started climbing the ladder of automation and with that, the shift in the economy from AI less world to the era of AI has been commendable. The appreciation of the current economic trends AI has captured the market around every sector. Google Research India funded six projects that rounded the challenges of the environment like social issues, disaster prevention and education.

By Ankush Singla, Co-founder, Coding Ninjas