Young children learn through their senses, through movement, and by manipulating tangible objects. Almost all learning moves from the physical to the mental, from the real to the imagined, from the concrete to the abstract.Young children, are not able to read yet. To compensate for this, we make use of building blocks to allow children to use it without the need to read.
Building block play is very important in early childhood. Computational thinking is born in the preschool block corner. As children build towers, roads, forts and bridge using blocks of calibrated shapes and sizes, they gain experience in recognizing and creating patterns using attributes such as shape and size. When one child seeks to imitate another child’s building project they are creating and using algorithms. When the block structures inevitably tumble and the blocks scatter across the floor, the children learn decomposition as they use their own small hands to sort the blocks into piles and return them to the shelves.The children are touching, lifting, holding, balancing, and, in many cases, knocking over physical, tangible objects. And that’s the real and essential beauty of the whole experience. By engaging in block play, children are literally laying the foundation for computational thinking.
Children must have these tactile and kinesthetic experiences with real objects in the real world in order to prepare them for the abstract and virtual experiences they will have later as they learn to use and program computers and robots. Computational thinking is as fundamental to education as reading, writing and arithmetic.
A report presented to the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2016 marked that 5 million jobs would be lost to automation worldwide. In the same month, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said that he believed automation to be threatening 69 per cent of jobs in India and 77 per cent in China. Evidence seems to be mounting that employment opportunities in the decades to come are likely to be heavily concentrated in the digital and engineering spheres.
Teaching something to young children imposes multiple challenges, one of which are: Young children have difficulties staying focused on the same task for longer than 10 minutes. So other than using building blocks we use robot mouse games .These games help the children to learn the basics of coding in a playway method. Children play together and are actively engaged in the learning material
As an early childhood educator I find myself playing with analogies that pair the tangible with the virtual:
Robots are to coding as blocks are to spatial reasoning.
It can help young children with variety of cognitive skills, including number sense, language skills, and visual memory. Also, it helps children to become divergent thinkers; they learn how to look at a problem from different points of view, come up with many possible solutions and select the best solution.
“Computational thinking” is a skill children must be taught if they are to be ready to participate effectively in this digital world.’