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New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

nytimes.com

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#21

>“The difficulty is getting enough teachers who are trained in it, and trained well enough to make it a good introduction to computer science,” said Barbara Ericson, the director of computing outreach at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “And if you are well-trained in computer science, you can make a lot more money in industry than teaching.” Seems to be the real problem here. What kind of negative effect might r…

It would be far outweighed by the positive effect of getting kids interested in programming. My first experience programming was when I was 7 and my 8 year old neighbor from Brazil would alter text based DOS games. Then we started making our own BASIC games. Who cares that we were using GOTO everywhere and doing everything wrong. We learned to love programming.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think of how long it took for literacy to become universally important, even though reading and writing was done centuries before Gutenberg. I think that you are underestimating this. It took so long for reading and writing to become common skills because there had to be a social shift for more people to stop farming and get an education. Shift from one type of education to another is much simpler. These days, you'…

I think you're missing the point. More and more of the job of programming will be handed over to machines. Meaning that the work will become easier and easier and the skills required will change as time passes. The other issue is the amount of time required to do anything useful with the skill. One you learn how to read you can read books quickly. If you learn how to code, it'll still take you 6 hours at least to pro…

If you learn how to code, it'll still take you 6 hours at least to produce anything that would be even moderately useful.

What? No way. I crank out extremely useful shell scripts in less than 5 minutes all the time. You don't have to use an IDE, compiler and some heavyweight framework just to be a programmer. Cobbling together a quick shell or Python script can let you do TONS of tasks that would be extraordinarily tedious, if not impossible, for a non-programmer.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#23
I admire the sentiment but I have to believe that at any scale someone qualified to teach CS would be doing something a bit more lucrative than teaching public school. Altruism is a beautiful thing, and something I wish I had more of, but let's face it: it's easier to demand this than to actually deliver it.

I imagine that when our industry has the next culling, public interest in CS will wane as usual until the next revolution is quickly unleashed by software fueled technology.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#24
When I was 8 my public school had a gifted program that I was fortunate enough to have participated in. They attempted to teach us BASIC on Apple IIe's, or rather the teacher (who had little or no understanding of programming) followed through a lesson book and told us what to do. We were creating still color images, pixel by pixel, and I thought it was the most boring, pointless, and stupid exercise we did that year. No connection was made to the programs that we used on a daily basis or the Nintendo games that I was so happy to run home and play. It completely disinterested me in computers for the next 15 years as I was more drawn to competent teachers who could share their love of music, mathematics, and literature.

I wince when I think about the years I spent not coding because of poorly-intentioned education. I'm not sure that a mandate to have that many CS teachers at that level will create positive educational experiences on the net.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#25
post #16

It's great to give the oportunity to kids to learn computer science but it looks like everyone associates computer science with programming. That's true at university level but does that make sense for young kids? Shouldn't we rather focus on the basics of computing: typing on a keyboard, understanding how an OS works, how internet works, a browser, etc. Then in high school some basics of programming in an easy but u…

It's a good thought and in an ideal world with enough resources, I think this is how things should go. But if there aren't enough resources, I think a "JIT" approach is sound where students learn how a browser works as their learning HTML or they learn how the internet works when they're making a call to an API, etc.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#26
post #23

I admire the sentiment but I have to believe that at any scale someone qualified to teach CS would be doing something a bit more lucrative than teaching public school. Altruism is a beautiful thing, and something I wish I had more of, but let's face it: it's easier to demand this than to actually deliver it. I imagine that when our industry has the next culling, public interest in CS will wane as usual until the next…

To me it is less about teaching computer science than teaching computer literacy. You learned physics or history in high school but that wasn't to make you a scientist or an historian.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#28
post #2

I imagine most of us programming now will be dead by the time (if at all) programming reaches some kind of universal acceptance; think of how long it took for literacy to become universally important, even though reading and writing was done centuries before Gutenberg. 20 years ago, learning programming wasn't as important because the technology just wasn't there to make it a good return on investment. But the value…

Unfortunately I don't know if it ever will reach the same level of importance as literacy, because the industry seems to be trying very hard to discourage regular users from ever becoming programmers or even "advanced users"; see the War on General Purpose Computing: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html I mean, how do you even convince someone that learning to…

Hmm, well I absolutely agree with the hoop jumping, and while yes no one has ever shared an iPhone executable with me (although they could and I could run it without any sort of license without jailbreaking), I've really been pretty content with Apple's walled gardens (hardware and software). Every app runs pretty smooth since there are so few models and screen sizes to accomodate and I never have to worry when I download from the app store, at all! That's a pleasure.

Setting up a development environment is an absolute pain in the ass, for a professional developer. But when I was in middle school on my pops pre G3 apple computer (or maybe it was the G3 at that point I'm not sure) I pretty easily figured out how to use a text editor and a preinstalled language to solve project euler problems. Boy those were fun.

I'd imagine access to the computer is a big issue, and only god knows where I found projecteuler for the first time but those sparks are really whats needed. If it ends up getting taught in some stale way as proofs in highschool were taught with lots of rote memorization and none of the art it'll probably end up producing a similar amount of interest.

Also, I presume, as people get older they're less likely in many cases to spend the time to learn a skill which doesn't offer anywhere near the tangible benefit of speaking and writing. Speaking and writing are practiced near constantly just because they're generally the best tools (along with drawing, gesturing, touch) for a job (communication) which must be performed everyday. I can't imagine the future where programming ever hits that level and see it more like the internals of a car with its standard bellcurve distribution of understanding across society.

Re: New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

#30

>“The difficulty is getting enough teachers who are trained in it, and trained well enough to make it a good introduction to computer science,” said Barbara Ericson, the director of computing outreach at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “And if you are well-trained in computer science, you can make a lot more money in industry than teaching.” Seems to be the real problem here. What kind of negative effect might r…

Yep, this is the central problem and I'm disappointed the city isn't taking any steps in offering incentives to potential teachers. The hard truth is there's a huge opportunity-cost for a professional programmer to step into a ~$50k role.

On a broader scale, what needs to happen is a TFA like organization for programmers that works with companies and source their employees for 1-2 year tours of duty. This org would train programmers how to teach (good programmer != good teacher) and place these programmers in schools that need them. Most critically, this org would need to convince employers to count this service as part of the employee's total work experience and professional development.

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