Preparing Students for the Future: Using Coding Games to Sharpen Logical Thinking and Academic Focus

Gone are the days of programming being something people learn in high school or college for purely professional purposes. Today, basic coding is something people in almost any walk of life can benefit from learning and is set to become an even more core part of people’s digital literacy going forward.

What if learning to code had even more benefits, however, especially as far as children and their academic success are concerned? Parents and education professionals understand that introducing young students to basic coding principles through coding games and gamified coding courses is an excellent way to sharpen their logical thinking and academic focus, and to improve their cognition in various other aspects. As a result, coding game courses are a great tool parents or tutors can use to prepare students for the future.

How coding games can enhance children’s cross-disciplinary academic strengths

For early years, children playing with interactive toys and games can be a great educational tool for improving a child’s early development. The interactive aspects of toys, such as constructors and puzzles, the creativity involved in playing with them, the logical thinking and problem-solving skills they nurture, the resilience and patience they help build up, and the delayed satisfaction they bring are all invaluable features, and kids can benefit from them.

For some, the move to more formal education can result in some children focusing more on gaming assessments rather than developing underlying critical thinking skills. Particularly with AI tools providing instant solutions for students, they are required to do less and less traditional critical thinking and problem solving.

Yet, there are countless reasons for students to focus on improving their thinking skills and not memorising information or submitting AI-generated papers. Whether it’s to improve their mathematics skills, to perform better in reasoning-heavy exams, such as 11+ or UKiset, or just to improve in a variety of cross-disciplinary academic fields, students of all ages can greatly benefit from going through coding game courses, either as part of their standard school curriculum, as an after-school activity, or just as exam preparation.

1. Coding games foster students’ creativity

Any game that motivates the player to seek creative solutions can be said to be good for developing one’s creative thinking, but coding games are designed to do that specifically. For children and students in any age group, good coding game programs offer age-appropriate coding courses that can push the student to come up with creative solutions to problems or to build and create complex and fascinating games, puzzles, and structures.

2. Coding games sharpen logical thinking

Coding is closely related to mathematics and logic, and coding games are a great way to push one’s logical thinking skills. Regardless of the student’s age and mathematics skills, there are coding game courses that are not only suitable but also offer arguably the best and fastest way to push a student’s logical thinking. For example, CodeMonkey is a coding game program that specialises in working with children in the US K-8 range and offers programs as simple and child-friendly as “Banana Tales” that are incredibly child-friendly and nevertheless work wonders in improving kids’ logical processes.

3. Coding games teach delayed gratification and improve attention spans

Putting effort into something difficult and then seeing the result you’ve achieved and the accomplishment you’ve managed to build up is a fantastic feeling and a great confidence booster. More importantly, it’s a great way to teach a child the value of delayed gratification.

In an age where immediate results matter and long form thinking skills become more challenging to develop e.g. seriously studying a given subject or practising for an exam, many students can benefit greatly from tools and courses that can help improve their attention spans and help them stay motivated during long study sessions.

4. Coding games enhance students’ resilience and persistence

Preparing for an exam can be stressful, especially when aiming for a top grade or looking to perform well. Then again, a lot of other things later in life also require lots of persistence and resilience, which many people lack. However, anyone who’s ever tried software programming knows that it’s the kind of profession that not only requires but teaches you both persistence and resilience. And coding games are the best equivalent that parents and tutors can offer their children.

A good coding game course is specifically designed to not only be entertaining and teach the basics of coding, but to do so via a series of challenges with gradually increasing difficulties that always force the student to push themselves more and more. This, together with the immense delayed gratification award in the end, is a great way to help a student develop and value of hard work, resilience, and persistence.

5. Coding games push algorithmic thinking

Algorithmic thinking is talked about much less often than logical thinking, probably because the latter is more familiar. Yet, algorithmic thinking is not only incredibly important, it’s also a basic skill each of us needs to hone sooner or later in life, and that is invaluable in times of reasoning-heavy challenges and exams, such as 11+ and UKiset.

So, what exactly is algorithmic thinking? An algorithm is any replicable action that always leads to the same result when repeated. As such, algorithmic thinking (or computational thinking) is the process of formulating and thinking through problems, and then working out their solutions on a step-by-step basis. And this is exactly the type of thinking coding games are excellent at developing.

6. Coding games improve pattern-seeking and structural thinking

Similar to algorithmic or computational thinking, structural thinking is rarely talked about, even though it needs to be, especially when it comes to education. It is fairly easy to define, too, as it’s the process of thinking through unstructured and complicated problems by forming a structured framework around them.

This is similar and related to pattern-seeking thinking, as that too functions by helping us give form and structure to problems that initially appear formless. And, as above, coding games and programming as a whole are excellent tools at helping students improve their structural and pattern-seeking thinking.

Coding game courses can help students achieve much more than merely getting the hang of the basics of coding. That is valuable in and of itself for many reasons, but beyond that, age-appropriate coding games are probably one of the best, if not the best, ways to help children and students of any age improve their cross-discipline thinking and learning skills.