How to Develop Logical Thinking in Children Aged 8 to 14
Your child can recite the rule and still not use it on the next question. The homework is right on Monday and wrong on Thursday with the same type of task. Knowing a rule and being able to apply it are two different things, and school teaches the second one hardly at all.
When parents look up how to develop logical thinking in children, the usual advice is puzzles: sudoku, draughts, chess, apps full of brain teasers. Only some of that works. Below: which part, and whether programming helps here.
When parents look up how to develop logical thinking in children, the usual advice is puzzles: sudoku, draughts, chess, apps full of brain teasers. Only some of that works. Below: which part, and whether programming helps here.
What logical thinking means in a child of eight to fourteen
There are three separate skills. Holding a rule in mind. Following the steps through to the end without losing the thread somewhere in the middle. And noticing when the answer contradicts the rule.
The third is the hardest. Here is an ordinary task: a wall of 45 square metres, 200 millilitres of paint per square metre. The child multiplies, writes down 9,000 and labels it litres - converting millilitres into litres is the step he forgot. Nine thousand litres of paint for a single wall is a road tanker, and the number itself should have stopped him, not a recheck of the arithmetic: the multiplication was correct.
The older the year group, the longer these chains get. In primary school a task usually asks the child to hold one or two conditions. Later a rule comes with an exception, plus the decision of whether this particular case falls under it. Children who were fine last year start to slip exactly here. None of it arrives on its own with age; it has to be learned.
The third is the hardest. Here is an ordinary task: a wall of 45 square metres, 200 millilitres of paint per square metre. The child multiplies, writes down 9,000 and labels it litres - converting millilitres into litres is the step he forgot. Nine thousand litres of paint for a single wall is a road tanker, and the number itself should have stopped him, not a recheck of the arithmetic: the multiplication was correct.
The older the year group, the longer these chains get. In primary school a task usually asks the child to hold one or two conditions. Later a rule comes with an exception, plus the decision of whether this particular case falls under it. Children who were fine last year start to slip exactly here. None of it arrives on its own with age; it has to be learned.
How to develop logical thinking in children at home
At home, what builds logic is anything with a rule and a result the child can see without you. That is also the line between the advice that works and the advice that does not.
Board games with clear rules give both: a wrong move shows up at once, and a dispute is settled by what the rules say rather than by who is louder. Draughts, chess, Carcassonne - any game where one move changes the next. Cooking from a recipe works the same way, but only if the child cooks alone and you do not prompt: a skipped step shows in what comes out of the bowl.
One more method is going through somebody else's mistake. Take a worked solution with an error in it and ask your child to find the point where it went wrong. A mistake in someone else's reasoning is easier to spot than in your own, and the skill being trained is the same. The easiest place to find such tasks is his own old exercise books: they are certainly in there, and a teacher has already marked them.
Puzzle books and brain-teaser apps are what parents reach for first, and they work worst of all. The child memorises how that particular type of puzzle is solved. Give him the same logic in a different task two weeks later and he usually does not recognise it.
The question that matters: will the child realise for himself that he got it wrong? If the puzzle book has answers, he learns about the mistake from them or from an adult, and mostly just nods. If it has none, he does not learn about it at all. In chess he loses the game, with a recipe he gets inedible dough, in a program he sees that the game does not work. That kind of answer is far more convincing.
Board games with clear rules give both: a wrong move shows up at once, and a dispute is settled by what the rules say rather than by who is louder. Draughts, chess, Carcassonne - any game where one move changes the next. Cooking from a recipe works the same way, but only if the child cooks alone and you do not prompt: a skipped step shows in what comes out of the bowl.
One more method is going through somebody else's mistake. Take a worked solution with an error in it and ask your child to find the point where it went wrong. A mistake in someone else's reasoning is easier to spot than in your own, and the skill being trained is the same. The easiest place to find such tasks is his own old exercise books: they are certainly in there, and a teacher has already marked them.
Puzzle books and brain-teaser apps are what parents reach for first, and they work worst of all. The child memorises how that particular type of puzzle is solved. Give him the same logic in a different task two weeks later and he usually does not recognise it.
The question that matters: will the child realise for himself that he got it wrong? If the puzzle book has answers, he learns about the mistake from them or from an adult, and mostly just nods. If it has none, he does not learn about it at all. In chess he loses the game, with a recipe he gets inedible dough, in a program he sees that the game does not work. That kind of answer is far more convincing.
Why programming trains logic differently from puzzles
Because the program does exactly what the child wrote, and shows the error immediately. Nobody tells him he is wrong. He sees for himself that the result is off, and then goes looking for the step where he made the mistake.
A typical case. A child of thirteen writes a program that checks whether a shopping list fits a budget. With four items it answers correctly, with five it does not. He has to go step by step: which item, which operation, what the program worked out at that point. That is taking apart his own reasoning. In a maths exercise book you do exactly the same thing when the answer does not come out. Often the mistake turns out to be in one line that took him half an hour to find.
There is a second reason. A program cannot be written roughly. If the child's picture of the result is vague, the program will not run, and every step has to be said out loud. Children who have been getting by on intuition find the first lessons hard, and then it starts to help.
This is backed by research. The largest piece of work on the subject, a review of 105 studies, was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2019. The authors compared children who had learned to program with similar children who had not. On tasks that give several conditions, ask for a conclusion and supply no method, the first group did better. School marks were barely touched.
A typical case. A child of thirteen writes a program that checks whether a shopping list fits a budget. With four items it answers correctly, with five it does not. He has to go step by step: which item, which operation, what the program worked out at that point. That is taking apart his own reasoning. In a maths exercise book you do exactly the same thing when the answer does not come out. Often the mistake turns out to be in one line that took him half an hour to find.
There is a second reason. A program cannot be written roughly. If the child's picture of the result is vague, the program will not run, and every step has to be said out loud. Children who have been getting by on intuition find the first lessons hard, and then it starts to help.
This is backed by research. The largest piece of work on the subject, a review of 105 studies, was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2019. The authors compared children who had learned to program with similar children who had not. On tasks that give several conditions, ask for a conclusion and supply no method, the first group did better. School marks were barely touched.
Which course fits which age
The tool depends on the age. Up to ten it is Scratch: the child assembles the program from ready-made blocks and sees the result at once. From ten to twelve, Roblox, where he builds a game and invents the rules for its players. From twelve, Python Start with real code. The format is the same throughout: online, forty lessons, each carrying on from the last.
For a child of twelve, Python Start usually fits: typing is easier for him than dragging blocks, and the problems can be bigger. In the early lessons he writes a number-guessing game where the program narrows the range from the answers it gets, and decides for himself what it does when the player lies. Then come lists: a class timetable, a set of scores that has to be sorted.
When a project stops working, the teacher does not hand over a finished solution. The question is always the same: what is the program doing where it breaks. Teacher selection here runs in three rounds, with reassessment every quarter. For younger children the way in is Scratch, which we have written about separately.
For a child of twelve, Python Start usually fits: typing is easier for him than dragging blocks, and the problems can be bigger. In the early lessons he writes a number-guessing game where the program narrows the range from the answers it gets, and decides for himself what it does when the player lies. Then come lists: a class timetable, a set of scores that has to be sorted.
When a project stops working, the teacher does not hand over a finished solution. The question is always the same: what is the program doing where it breaks. Teacher selection here runs in three rounds, with reassessment every quarter. For younger children the way in is Scratch, which we have written about separately.
The quickest way to find out whether this suits your child is a single lesson. The free trial lesson runs 60 minutes, online, one to one with a teacher.
What to expect, and over what period
What to expect is a change in behaviour rather than in marks, and the research names no timescale. Here is what changes: "I can't do it" used to arrive almost at once, and now the child rereads the task, tries a simpler version, checks his own assumption.
Do not count on a top mark in the next maths test. A test checks how quickly the child recalled the right method, while programming develops something else: working out which method applies here.
You can check at home. Give the child a problem slightly harder than usual and watch the first five minutes. A year ago he shrugged. Now you are waiting for a question: if the question comes, he has started thinking it through. One task tells you nothing, so watch three or four over a month.
Do not count on a top mark in the next maths test. A test checks how quickly the child recalled the right method, while programming develops something else: working out which method applies here.
You can check at home. Give the child a problem slightly harder than usual and watch the first five minutes. A year ago he shrugged. Now you are waiting for a question: if the question comes, he has started thinking it through. One task tells you nothing, so watch three or four over a month.
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Frequently asked questions
Yes, though not in the way the adverts put it. The largest piece of work on the subject, a review of 105 studies in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2019, found that children who had learned to program did better on reasoning tasks than peers who had not. School marks were barely touched. What changes is how a child approaches an unfamiliar problem, not the marks in the register.
Eight is the usual floor, because that is where block-based courses start, ours included. Children aged 8 to 10 work with blocks, and from about twelve typed code stops being an obstacle for most. Starting later is not a disadvantage: a child of fourteen moves through the early material considerably faster.
They train the puzzles they contain. The gains tend to stay inside the app, because the child learns the pattern of those specific tasks rather than a way of approaching unfamiliar ones. Anything where the child builds something that can fail will do more.
Often more of one. Children who find maths easy have rarely had to debug their own reasoning, because the answers arrive before the reasoning is tested. A program that runs but gives the wrong result is the first thing many of them meet that will not yield to being clever quickly.
One lesson a week with a project the child returns to between lessons is enough to see a change over a term. What matters more than hours is that the child finishes things, because an abandoned project teaches the opposite of persistence.
Scherer, R., Siddiq, F., Sánchez Viveros, B. (2019). The cognitive benefits of learning computer programming: A meta-analysis of transfer effects. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(5), 764-792.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1220317
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1220317
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