Recently, Spotify, a Swedish music streaming service, launched in South Korea. The reason why Spotify is loved by a lot of people around the world is because of the playlists that AI generates for the users. The AI(artificial intelligence) analyses the user’s music flavor and suggests new songs that fit the flavor. I am also one of the Spotify users. The Spotify artificial intelligence generated a playlist that has songs that I had never heard before but fit my preference. These days, artificial intelligence knows people better than they know themselves. As AI technology brings convenience to people's lives, the demand for AI and coding—a skill needed to create AI—is increasing.

Despite the fact that it is a computer, this AI is a service developed by human beings using coding. Coding is now one of great abilities with which people of the future and present can use their creativity. More specifically, when people say coding, it means that they are using various programming languages like C, JAVA, and Python to command to computers. As coding enables us to develop various products, if we use our creativity and knowledge, teenagers’ interest in coding is increasing. 

According to an instructor of HelloAlgo, a computer academy located at Songpa-gu, the demand for coding classes has been increasing greatly recently. Also, as cutoffs for various computing competitions are increasing, we can see that teenagers’ coding abilities have been greatly enhanced. 

In Korea, coding became a regular subject for elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. Minyoung Park, a 8th grader at Korea International School Jeju Campus, recently enrolled in a coding class outside school because he wants to learn more advanced coding than Scratch, which he learned in elementary school. In his academy, there were a lot of people even on Saturday.

I interviewed with Junseo Lee, who won various hackathons and had lectured in a famous platform (for more information about him, visit junseo.pythonanywhere.com). He answered that students’ toppest concern seems to be the fear of losing ground in competition. That's why many students tend to study coding instead of following up their academics. However, he thinks that coding and academics are not separate things because various academic experiences help one to become a successful coder. He thinks that it’s important for young coders to find good balance between academics and coding. Specifically, he saw a student giving up academics in order to focus on learning coding, but he thinks academic knowledge is needed in order to better understand coding.

Lee wants young coders to actively have various experiences, which would become the fundamentals of coding. Coding is not about just generating a working program; rather, it’s about “developing programs that make people’s lives easier” is what Lee argues. To seek ways to help people using coding—he says—having diverse experiences is important. 

We are already aware of the prediction that many people would lose jobs because of the development of technology. Crystal Lim-Lange, in her book “Human Skills”, people would have to find “human skills” that technology cannot ever replace in order to prepare for the future. Thus, it seems that young coders need to not only enhance their technical skills but also have various experiences and have some interests in human beings.

Shinyong Park
Grade 11
Korea International School Jeju Campus