> Do you guys have any scientific evidence to support this kind of claim, i.e. learn to code improves your thinking ability in general?
If you're actually interested in this, Papert's book Mindstorms, which is cited in the post, lists many reasons why this might be the case. The most obvious are that computers interpret everything literally, so when you express your ideas you're forced to do so in a way that totally lacks ambiguity.
He also talks about how in a classroom setting, students are usually trained to react to "wrong answers" by wincing, moving on, and forgetting it happened, whereas in programming it's obvious that no one ever gets things right on the first try--debugging is necessary for programming, and debugging teaches students to think in terms of "how can this be improved" rather than the right/wrong of traditional schoolwork.
There's tons more in the book, but most of it can be summed up in that programming teaches meta-cognition and forces you to consider questions of epistemology.
Those are plausible reasons/theories for the claim, but not scientific evidence. In social science, it is not uncommon that plausible assumptions fail to obtain direct support from data.
If you're actually interested in this, Papert's book Mindstorms, which is cited in the post, lists many reasons why this might be the case. The most obvious are that computers interpret everything literally, so when you express your ideas you're forced to do so in a way that totally lacks ambiguity.
He also talks about how in a classroom setting, students are usually trained to react to "wrong answers" by wincing, moving on, and forgetting it happened, whereas in programming it's obvious that no one ever gets things right on the first try--debugging is necessary for programming, and debugging teaches students to think in terms of "how can this be improved" rather than the right/wrong of traditional schoolwork.
There's tons more in the book, but most of it can be summed up in that programming teaches meta-cognition and forces you to consider questions of epistemology.