Coding and Precoding with Young Children

This article explains how coding stories and robots can be used to teach coding with young children. Additional resources are shared.

Coding stories and coding games are playful, hands-on ways for children to explore and experiment with early coding. They offer opportunities for interactions and collaborative learning. If coding is new to you, you will find that it builds on many familiar early math and literacy concepts.

This article shows that using age-appropriate coding toys has a significant, positive impact on preschoolers’ math abilities, according to the findings of a pilot study.

This article gives parents tips on building your preschooler’s math skills – including counting, pattern recognition, and sequencing to solve problems – to support computational thinking.

The STEMIE Learning Trajectories page offers early educators over 50 resources for teaching concepts within technology and computational thinking for young children.

This site provides links to the Illinois Learning Standards. The Illinois Learning Standards establish expectations for what all students should know and be able to do in each subject at each grade.

At STEMIE, we use the concept of computational thinking when we talk about the ‘T’ in STEM. Computational thinking is the method used to problem-solve by determining ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’. Computational thinking has three main ideas: Repetition & Looping, Sequencing, and Debugging. Each main idea is comprised of its own set of progression steps within the page with resources to help you navigate through the steps.

This article explains that coding can be engaging and fun, but it’s only meaningful when there are strong higher order thinking (HOT) foundational skills first put in place, helping young children understand the process of coding. Young children can’t create meaningful experiences through coding without these foundational skills and without adults to help support their learning.