The Importance of Technology Literacy
From the vast cornfields of Iowa to the cobbled streets of London, Coco Coders founder and CEO Elizabeth Tweedale has been setting new standards in coding education for young students. Now she’s back in the US and has brought her award winning coding curriculum for students 6-12 years old with her.
With no end in sight for the technology industry’s unprecedented growth, coding and other STEM skills are more in demand than ever. Elizabeth recognized that students needed more resources in addition to the current school curriculum to support the future of the tech industry.
For Elizabeth, teaching coding is about fostering technology literacy, not ensuring that everyone who learns coding becomes a computer scientist or a software engineer. Tangential skills like computational thinking and collaboration are outputs of learning to code that everyone needs to effectively interact with technology.
Helping to tackle the imbalance of males to females in STEM career tracks is also something that Coco’s CEO is passionate about. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2019 women represented just 27% of workers in STEM industry careers. So how can we help women become equally represented in this field?
The answer: Get them engaged early. Recent studies show that girls who engage with STEM subjects before the age of 13 are the most likely to go on to study it in higher education. Coco Coders focuses on making an impact in that crucial time frame by developing its curriculum for 6-12 year olds.
Coco Coders’ uniquely designed curriculum teaches coding by engaging students through their interests. Instead of a straight forward class teaching students how to code their own drones, for example, they’ll focus on ocean conservation and how drones are being used to help remove plastics from the ocean. Then, when they do learn how to program their own drone, it shows them a wider vision in which they understand that technology can be positively applied to whatever passions they have.
“[This] shows them how they can use technology to make an impact in whatever they’re interested in.” Elizabeth explains. It also firmly removes any limits to what their imaginations can create with the power of coding.
“This generation has been born with technology, so I think that they have the opportunity to understand how their relationship with technology works and then they don’t have the same fears that even me as a technology professional still has.” Elizabeth says.
Advanced technology will be more integrated with our future than ever before, and Coco Coders is providing a way for the next generation to be ready and able to meet it.
To read the full interview Elizabeth gave to innovationIOWA, click here.
Looking for more information about how to prepare your child for the technological future? Download our free Guide to Raising Future-Ready Kids.