Making Coding the New Foreign Language

Should schools consider offering coding as another second language? This is the question on the minds of many educators as well as state lawmakers in recent years. An advocate for coding (or more specifically the push to expose more children to the computer science field), I see the merits of incorporating coding into the school curriculum. What I continue to question is the move to somehow have coding replace foreign language in school. If there is a push to replace foreign language with coding then it is important to weigh the cost of replacing one form of communication for another. Should we offer both? What do you think? Click here to find a resource from the folks at Edutopia for schools interested in looking at coding as a new foreign language. tlb

Photo Source

About principalaim

Head of Lower School & Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Louisville Collegiate School

View all posts by principalaim →

One comment on “Making Coding the New Foreign Language”

codeinfig
February 1, 2017

It wouldve made my life easier. Ive always wanted to learn another (human) language, but it was easier to learn enough Basic, Python, Logo, Bash and Javascript for my taste.

They normally dont localize keywords (and they generally shouldnt) but logo is an exception– LibreLogo is localized down to the keyword. for small, educational languages I think that has some merit. I found some advantage in localizing fig to Portuguese; figueira could be the only Portuguese programming language, and I can code in it– but if it counted as learning Portuguese… well… Id proudly say I can speak it (but I cant.) It may not be a real substitute.

Reply