Prompted by the New Education Policy's plan to make coding compulsory from class 6, the piece asks whether young children can and should learn programming. It recalls how Western programmers from Bill Gates to Linus Torvalds grew up tinkering with computers, learning from manuals and repeated trial and error, and notes that mathematically inclined children take to coding readily. Today's children are already adept at YouTube and voice search from the age of three or four, but the author warns, citing the White Hat Junior controversy, that pressuring them with promises of becoming the next Sundar Pichai can harm their childhood.
A list of resources follows, including MIT's Scratch, Chris Ferrie's baby science books, No Starch Press titles, Linda Liukas's 'Hello Ruby' and the Brilliant app. Closing remarks question the assumptions behind a class 2 computer textbook and parents' habit of handing over smartphones to keep children busy, and the author leaves open whether children should be pushed towards coding or allowed to be bored and co-learn with adults.
