Learning to code: do I need to be good at maths?

Teaching yourself to code doesn't require much maths, just logic, and the ability to 'borrow' from other people's work.

Learning to code: to develop websites and apps, you need only elementary maths skills.

A lot of people ask me how they can learn to code. Their curiosity is well-placed – the digitisation of our world, from big business to domestic chores, is escalating quickly. There are so many gadgets, technologies and products in our lives that we simply don’t understand.

But it is also ill-served, mainly because there are not enough people who know how to teach this. The likelihood is that you will need to teach yourself, as our children are doing right now.

The majority are also put off by how impenetrable the whole world can seem from the outside. Over the next few weeks I’ll be addressing and hopefully putting to rest some of these myths; I will be led by the comments on these articles as to what it is that is causing the greatest concern as a barrier or misconception.

Let’s start with one of the biggest turn-offs for most people when it comes to coding: ‘if my maths is terrible, am I a lost cause?’

It depends what you want to do. To develop websites and apps, you need only elementary maths skills. The maths you learn in primary school will see you through nicely. Thinking logically and conceptually is far more important. You also need to be well versed in the art of copy and pasting. No joke.