Back to Basics: What is Coding?

Hey there, coders and parents!

Here at The Code Zone we’ve decided this week we’re going to be returning Back to Basics, to help people understand the simplest bits of coding and how they work! However, we also wanted to take things a little further too, and answer a question that is surprisingly simple, but seriously important: What actually IS coding? We talk about it all the time, and it’s very important to make the world go around, but we get so caught up in doing code, we sometimes forget to explain what it even is! So put on your learning caps, and let’s figure it out together.

What is coding?

Coding, when boiled down to its very basics, is essentially ‘talking the language of computers, to get computers to do things’.

Think about it like this: computers are seriously complicated devices that can do some absolutely amazing things. But as a machine, it can only ever do things if you tell it what to do – and how are you supposed to talk to something with no ears, no eyes, and no ability to think for itself?! They have potential to be incredibly useful, but without somehow telling it to do stuff, it’s just a very expensive metal box!

This is where coding comes in – over decades of painstaking work, computer scientists have developed ways to ‘talk’ to computers, to give them instructions to do the things we want them to do. The computers of course aren’t really ‘understanding’ anything, or speaking an actual language – the code is just flicking the right switches (to put it very simply) to get the result we want.

Now, at this point, you might think – well, I can press buttons or tap screens to tell a computer what to do, right? And yes, that’s true – but what’s telling the computer that a button press means anything at all? Why does a computer think that pressing a button means ‘do this simple thing’ instead of ‘start tap dancing upside-down while juggling lemons’, or just ignoring it altogether? Once again, at some point the computer has to have been instructed on what to do by a human being, through coding.

When is coding even used?

It’s a very common misunderstanding that coding is only really used for stuff that is super techy, like in laptops and phones, or for stuff inside of computers already like video games or software. But while those things of course heavily rely on coding, they’re far from the only things using it.

It may shock you – but almost everything in your house that you can ‘tell’ to do something, or that does something by itself in any way, will be using some form of coding. In some cases, this is incredibly simple code, but it’s code either way, and in other cases, the code might actually be quite advanced but hidden very well! And when I say ‘telling’ a device to do something, that’s not just speaking to it or typing on it; that includes pressing a button to activate the hoover, adjusting the heating in your house, and other simple things like that. Any time you instruct a device to do something, in some way, coding has been used!

And when you think about it, this really makes sense. Take the hoover for example. How does the hoover know to start vacuuming when you hold down the on button, instead of just sitting there? The Hoover Fairy certainly isn’t telling it to – it’s the science of coding. Inside the hoover, there are electrical circuits that detect if the button is being pressed, and then signal to begin the vacuuming by redirecting electricity to the right places.

But wait – that sounds like mechanical and electrical stuff, not coding! Nobody has a screen and a computer in their hoover, so how is code being used?

Good question! Coding is being used in these situations because coding actually has its roots in mechanical and electrical engineering. The very first building blocks of coding – flicking switches on and off – are mechanical. Once you start to understand that modern coding is (again, put simply) just very complicated ways of flicking millions of tiny, real-life switches instead of speaking mystical spells to the computer, it gets a lot less scary, and much more understandable! And so, when you use any form of electric device in the modern age, there is some form of code being used, even if it’s super simple.

Why should people learn coding?

It’s a fair question – even if we understand what coding is, why should we bother learning how to actually do it? Well, it boils back down to the idea that the only way to ‘talk’ to a computer is through knowing how to code. And of course, one look around in the modern world will show you that computers are everywhere. This means that people who don’t yet know how to code are at a significant disadvantage to those that do – learning to code is like a key that unlocks half the locks in the world, as it allows you to change and innovate the way that the devices all around us work. It’s especially important for children to learn these skills, as the amount of computers and complex machines is increasing rapidly – in the future, not knowing how to do basic coding could easily become like not knowing fundamentals such as reading, writing and basic maths. What’s more, learning to code as a result opens up tons of future job prospects, ranging from engineers and game developers to writers, artists, scientists, builders – you name it, coding will most likely be used somewhere in the job!

Hopefully this post has given you a little insight into the basics of what coding really is, and how we use it all the time. It’s much less confusing than it sounds, and here at The Code Zone we’re committed to teaching coding in a way that helps our members get to grips with the fundamentals, while expressing their creativity and learning complex skills along the way. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you guys next time!