The barrage of shiny ads that follow us on our screens make far more immodest claims -from sharpening left-brain skills to switching on a child’s creativity or turning her into Bill Gates.
The digital native that she is, eight-year-old Hirranya Rajani, with her experience of building an app and multiple skirmishes with pesky bugs, takes no time to break it down. “Coding is like, say, your friend comes home and asks for a glass of water. You are busy. She doesn’t know your house, and you have to tell her how to go about it, step by step. Tell her where the glass of water is kept, which way to turn till she gets there . . . Coding is like that, communicating with your computer and telling it what to do, and how to do it,” she says.
