Code School: Preparing Children for the Future

Published on: January 18, 2022

“It is not difficult to understand the bounds in which computers can solve problems and it is really important to know what those bounds are because software today is beating all traditional, non-software forms of problem-solving”, says Asad Rehman, the Co-founder of Code School, as he explains the importance of software-driven solutions in a world run by technology. “You don’t even need to write good software these days – any software, even the worst software will outperform the best non-software solutions that exist.”

Code School is an initiative started by siblings, Asad and Sadaf Rehman with the primary aim to give children an early exposure to programming, technology and coding through a fun and interactive learning experience. The teachers at Code School include expert tutors from around the world who help the students develop essential skills on resilience, critical thinking, and problem-solving – which the founders believe will be critical for them to move forward and become active contributors to society, and the future workforce.

Asad and Sadaf have meticulously worked to structure the curriculum at Code School so that it can be easily integrated into already-existing systems of schooling in Pakistan. They have brought together what is traditionally an after-school program for children into a textbook for early-age introduction in programming. The curriculum can be used at elementary schools and junior-level schools so that children can have programming knowledge right from the beginning – which they believe, can help develop intuition in them and facilitate them in their choices later on in life, even in non-technical fields.

“Our kids are going to graduate into a world where 65% of the jobs haven’t even been invented as yet”, says Sadaf Rehman on the need to solve for the conundrum of the future of work by instilling in children the skills that will be useful for them in the future in which many of the fields we know of now won’t exist.

Both Asad and Sadaf believe that our traditional schools are not doing enough and that fundamentals of computer science should be introduced to every child from an early age. One of the things that people need to realize is that coding and programming are not only for people who plan to work in a technical field, instead, it is very open-ended and offers a wide array of possibilities that will immensely help people across various disciplines and will also allow them to adapt to the ever-changing world.

“Today’s children are 21st century learners, being taught by teachers from the 20th century in classrooms that were designed in the 19th century. So we are are not preparing our children for a tech-centric world but for Industrial Revolution jobs from 300 years ago that don’t exist and will not exist”, says Sadaf Rehman as she acknowledges the changing demands for education and learning that need to be updated to accommodate the skills that will be required for children to excel in the new world they will inhabit.

Watch our full conversation with Asad and Sadaf Rehman as they talk about the importance of learning coding, the problems they identify in Pakistan’s present-day education system, and what they believe is needed to improve coding literacy in the country.