Creativity
Coding encourages you to showcase your creativity in numerous ways. Artists can design characters, animations, and graphic novels via coding. Novelists can use coding to develop highly interactive prose. All programmers showcase their individual creativity through their individual means of programming specific tasks.
Problem Solving
Computing promotes a problem solving way of thinking much like mathematics does. Given a problem (e.g., find the shortest path from a city to another), computer science suggests ways to approach the problem that can be applied in real life. "Computational thinking" is now a well-established way to recognize algorithmic motifs in everyday life, e.g., in following a recipe to cook a meal or identifying the best way to make a travel reservation.
Logic
Computers are die-hard logical beasts. If your program does not work, there is a logical reason for it. Understanding how logic permeates coding gives students excellent debugging and reasoning skills that they will find useful in everyday life.
Passion
Coding has made its way into so many fields that every discipline has found ways to infuse computing into its fabric. Coding ignites one's passion and enables you to pursue your dreams in a myriad different directions.
Persistence
Coding a project from scratch to full functionality teaches students the values of incremental development, problem decomposition and, most importantly, persistence. The more you code, the better your skills become and, over time, this pays off in many domains, not just coding.
Like this blog post? Also checkout Top Career Paths for Coders. Also for a quirky read, see our blog post on rusting and how it relates to computing.