ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of coding for young children. It focuses on the developmental milestones and learning experiences that children can attain by becoming programmers and by thinking like computer scientists. Coding engages children as producers, and not merely consumers, of technology. Coding can happen on the screen, as in Liana's case with ScratchJr, or it can happen through objects in the world. The chapter focuses on the activity of coding as a playground. It advocates that coding should be part of every young child's computational thinking experience. Coding engages and reinforces computational thinking. At the same time, computational thinking engages and reinforces coding. In this context, coding is the action of putting together sequences of instructions and debugging or problem solving when things do not work as expected. In the process, children encounter powerful ideas from computer science and thus engage in computational thinking.
