Growth mindset is when students believe they can get smarter and better through effort. (Read more in Carol Dweck’s book).
This isn’t specific to coding, but it's particularly relevant because most kids will at least give coding a shot if presented with the opportunity (especially when it’s presented in an exciting way). However, many will drop out as it gets harder.
How can teachers and parents cultivate Growth Mindset?
“Culture of Error”—one of the techniques described in detail in the teaching bible Teach like a Champion—is “a classroom culture that respects error, normalizes it, and values learning from it, (which) is one of the characteristics of a high-performing classroom.”
When teaching your child to code, here are some points you can bring up:
We all create “bugs” (what developers call mistakes). It’s expected!
Professional developers spend 40-50% of their time debugging.
Tech companies hire people called Quality Assurance staff whose job is to find bugs all day long!
Bugs make us smarter and better coders.
You can work on building Growth Mindset in all areas of life, and it’ll have a great impact on their success with code.