Don't Teach Coding: Until You Read This Book

Don’t Teach Coding: Until You Read This Book offers educators and parents a historically grounded and philosophically sensitive description of what coding is and tackles tough questions of whether coding is a field for everyone or a field just for specialists. Foster and Handley see the need for addressing the actual question of “how to teach coding” and demonstrate to the reader that they already do know how to code--or at least can understand it better than they might think.

In this book, you can read an overview of recent scientific results on how the mind learns coding and partake in concrete exercises that will strengthen your coding skills. Dive in to a series of discussions of topics that are familiar to any adult reader and learn about the incredible breadth of topics that can be discussed using computers science principles.

Subject areas will include:

• History of computer science education
• The language wars
• Answers to “Why should people teach to code?”
• Things that don’t seem related to coding at first glance. Look at them through a computational lens
• How to “teach to code”
• Review science that’s relevant to teaching to code
• Is coding a “science,” “engineering,” “technology,” “mathematics,” or “language?”