Young Children’s Perceptions of Coding and Implications

To inform the design of personally meaningful computational learning experiences for young people, it is necessary to investigate children’s perceptions of coding, such that new learning experience designs can better leverage their funds of knowledge. We conducted focus groups with 20 young children in two coding workshops to learn their perceptions of coding. The young participants mainly form their perceptions of coding based on past coding- and computer-related experiences and typically associate coding with controlling the computer, creating projects, expressing ideas, playing video games, and the language for communicating with the computer. Importantly, young children might not know the right strategies to debug code but try practices like restarting the device and deleting the whole code. Based on the findings, we highlight the pedagogical implications to design productive computational learning experiences for young people.