The future of work — why your kids need to learn code

We love our sci-fi here at D4, and you can't be into sci-fi and not have noticed a recent trend in movies covering the future: from Arnie in The Terminator to Will Smith in I, Robot, from 1999's The Matrix to 2015's Ex Machina, the theme is unmistakable: the machines are coming. Channel 4's impressive new show Humans is another example of the genre.

Now we're not about to build a basement bunker and prepare for the end of the world, but some of the ideas explored in these films are coming to pass: robots are getting smarter and smarter, and their rate of learning won't slow down. Automated software and hardware is now essential to many jobs and production processes and that's going to continue too.

With that in mind, the ability to code is a skill that's going to become increasingly valuable in the future. Every year software becomes more essential to doing business, and the engineers who can write that software become more essential too. We think it's vital that our kids are taught programming skills at an early age, so it's encouraging to see UK schools moving in this direction. Children as young as five now have coding on their curriculum.

Of course it's not just about building apps — learning programming teaches a high-level of creativity and problem-solving, skills that are going to benefit our children no matter what career they go into. It can even boost understanding in other subjects like Maths and English. There are efforts to get adults learning to code as well, even if they don't have any previous experience in the area, and it can help people move to new careers in our increasingly tech-literate age.

No matter what kind of coding curriculum your kids face at school, we'd encourage you to encourage them to make it a priority: the number of jobs requiring coding skills is only going to go upwards in the future, and you might even be inspiring the next Mark Zuckerberg.

There are plenty of great, free resources on the Web, too. Some of our favourites include the Scratch coding site from MIT, the Kano Computer Kit (ideal for learning to code), the Discovery Education Coding platform, the CBBC Technobabble game maker engine and Ruby Warrior, an impressive retro game using just a few lines of code.

The efforts that schools and the government are already making are encouraging, but there's always more we can be doing to promote code fluency for our kids and get them prepared for the future — as the sci-fi robots of the movies become reality, it's important that we're talking their language.