• Question: If you had to explain to a 5-year-old and a 90-year-old in one sentence what coding is, what would your two sentences be?

    Asked by on 17 Jun 2020. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Martin Coath

      Martin Coath answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      If I wanted to explain to you how to do something complicated that you had never done before, I would have to be very careful about giving you a sequence of simple, easy to understand, instructions in the right order. The same is true when you are teaching computers how to do something, except you cannot use a spoken language like English, you have to use a computer language instead.

    • Photo: Ricardo Ramirez

      Ricardo Ramirez answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Coding is giving telling the computer of what it should do.

    • Photo: Andy Smith

      Andy Smith answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      My answer would be the same to both, so I’m going to use two sentences 🙂

      Computer code is like a recipe for a cake – it’s a list of instructions telling you what to do and in what order to produce something at the end. So the act of coding is like the process of inventing a new recipe.

    • Photo: Emma Wilson

      Emma Wilson answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      I think I would would tell them “code is the rules or instructions a computer needs to perform a task”.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 18 Jun 2020:

      To a 5-year-old: “Coding is what tells your smart-phone or tablet what to do when you touch the screen”.

      To a 90-year-old: “Coding is writing instructions in a language electronic devices can understand in order to make them work”.

      I think they do need different answers – a 5-year-old will likely have a limited vocabulary, so short words are good. A 90-year-old will have seen a LOT and even if they’re not technically-minded will have seen loads of electronics – but might not appreciate there’s a machine “language”.

    • Photo: Hannah Im

      Hannah Im answered on 18 Jun 2020:

      Coding is similar to writing a song – nothing is there until you write it, but then once you do, you have something beautiful that can inspire people do something amazing with it. The problem with inspiration is that it can also inspire people into doing something awful. So coders have a big responsibility! (Ok, can’t really do it in one sentence, other than to say coding is similar to writing a song.)

    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 19 Jun 2020:

      I might use the same explanation for both the target audiences. “Coding is a set of instructions which the computer can understand. It is typically used when we have to ask the computer do a set of repetitive and tedious tasks.”

    • Photo: Anar Yusifov

      Anar Yusifov answered on 20 Jun 2020:

      Coding is like going to a store – programmer writes list of products and where to buy them and then computer executes it. Most of the time what you mean is what you get, but some artistic computer scientists invent programming languages where you write a program in the form of something like: “buy something for dinner today, we will cook Italian cuisine” and computer returns with some pasta, ground beef, some herbs and tomato sauce.

      5 year old I have around accepted the explanation – so it passed my tests 🙂

    • Photo: Laura Murgatroyd

      Laura Murgatroyd answered on 22 Jun 2020:

      I think I would use a similar explanation if I only had one sentence:

      Coding is telling a computer instructions, so that it can do something for you, such as play a video, or add up some numbers.

    • Photo: Steve Williams

      Steve Williams answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      Writing software is essentially about creating instruction for a computer. You have to be careful when writing software as the computer will do exactly what you have told it to do. If there is mistake or “bug” in your instructions then that wrong instruction will effect the computers output every time it is executed. If that mistake in the output is small it might not get spotted for sometime.

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 24 Jun 2020:

      Coding is:
      for a 5-year-old: a way to tell toys (and other things) what they should do, without having to shout at them
      for a 90-year-old: how we won the second world war!

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