1. Society and technology are intertwined

There are several reasons it is important the biggest one being how intertwined technology is with today’s society. For example I would bet that you have a phone, computer or tablet of some sort and I would bet that 99 percent of the people you know do too. Even if you don’t you likely have to interact with technology at some point whether it be a ATM, a car, or some sort of security system. So, it makes sense to know how to use those things and how they work to some extent because no one wants to be stranded in the middle of no where because they don’t know how to change a tire. Same thing goes for computers you don’t want to be unable to say share a google doc with someone or one of the other million things that involve having things typed correctly because you didn’t know it was case specific, which some things like passwords are, although that is something that you generally learn the first time it doesn’t work if the program or website doesn’t specifically tell you that it is case specific.

2. It’s useful for most jobs

Also, knowing how to program or being comfortable with computers and how those computers work can help you at your job since a lot of businesses have some sort of website, cash register or require the use of computers. For example using google sheets is rather similar to programming since a lot of the time you need to use some sort of function like say you need to find the square of b1, you would need to use the ‘^’ symbol in order to use exponents. Another example would be that your a teacher and you use Canvas( a educational tool to turn in assignments online or to post modules for your students to study), in order for your students to see a module you need to publish it, and they need to be enrolled in your course that you also have publish. While you can also make assignments which have the option of having a due date on it. Now say like my biology teacher for some reason your students can’t see your biology course even though they are enrolled in a biology course registered to you and you have the biology course published. What could be a reason that they can’t access it? One reason could be that the course that the students are enrolled in and the course that the teacher published aren’t exactly the same meaning that one is titled “AP biology”, while the other is “AP Biology”, so the reason it’s not working is because canvas is case sensitive and doesn’t recognize the two courses as the same thing because they are both stored in the program at two different memory locations as two separate things.

2.b. Can reduce routine tasks

Programming can also be used to make simple programs to help with more routine tasks. For example doing a certain calculation over and over again, or having to always send the same email with some minor differences, can be done with a program. Which would likely only need a simple program, of course you need to know a specific programming language that is capable of doing that routine for example HTML is probably not the best language for calculations. Also, just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy depending on what you are trying to do, but normally if you are doing tedious tasks over and over again it will be worth it.

3. Helps you learn skills and/or practice them

Another reason to learn programming is that it is a good way to practice problem solving. It’s good practice because every program does something this can be solving a math problem or all the mechanics involved in playing a game. So, a lot of the time when your programming you have to think about the different parts involved in what you want the program to do. For example you want to find how much money you will make if you put x amount of money in a bank account that has y interest a year for w years. So you need to do three things, first find the amount of interest you get each year in dollars for x, second add that amount of money to x and third subtract 1 year from w, and repeat those steps until w is equal to zero. In other words programming forces you cut up a problem into different parts, so they are easier to manage, and think about how all those parts are all interconnected, since in the example if you didn’t recalculate the y after you had added the interest from last year to x, you would end up with the wrong answer since the interest comes from the amount of money in the bank account which will increase every year assuming you don’t take any out. Programming can also help you go from more specific solutions to general ones since you could take the steps from the example and apply it no matter what the interest is, the amount of money you put in or the number of years that you don’t take any money out. It would also be rather easy to add in another part like say for example, you added z amount of money every year to the account, you would only need to during the add z to x along with the amount of interest for that year in the second step. Essentially, programming can help you practice breaking problems down into smaller more workable pieces, thinking logically and thinking abstractly(aka thinking more in variables like I did in the example).