What does coding actually teach?

Coding is not a survival skill. Compare it with speaking, reasoning, common sense, finding food and you realize you cannot put it in the same bucket.

One of the important problems with coding curriculum design is the amount of emphasis on computer science-y stuff like algorithms.

Apart from the syntactical sugar and the app/game dev stuff, coding teaches breaking down of complex problems into simpler stuff, the power of abstractions after one has been doing it for some time, a lot of persistence with debugging stuff when things do not go as we expect and problem-solving in general with a vague idea of how to proceed and with limited tools at our disposal.

Most of these skills are transferable and can be used in real life. Sadly, a lot of present-day teaching to code is focused on jargon and language constructs, even with visual programming languages out there.

I particularly liked the longer format contests where you had a week or more to research and try out coding solutions evaluating tradeoffs like time complexity versus solution accuracy and more.

Would coding be a relevant skill 20 years from now?

The primary assumption with teaching a 7-year-old kid to code is that coding in its present form would be an essential thing 20 years down the line.

Coding would still be a huge thing but at a higher level of abstraction for most common tasks.

The no/low code solutions that are expected to be much more refined in the future.

Automated code generation using deep learning would be more pleasant two decades from now.