New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

On the day to day level I'd say certain subjects might be more applicable to this sentiment than others. For instance, sexual education where the results can be life changing.

But as for computer science, like regular science, it will inspire a few kids who go on to learn their follies and produce work in the field and everyone else will either trudge through it or drop it and never have it affect their daily life in any manner so it doesn't particularly matter and is probably better to have those extra inspired children in society.

That being said, a course on the things that will actually effect most every childs life such as what are those TOS things you click away near constantly, where are the privacy settings in facebook and what are the different levels of privacy and what can you do in abusive or threatening situations, how often does personal data get stolen, how to store confidential material in a way minimize potential vectors for attack, etc. That'd be an absolutely useful course and would be best if taught well (as opposed to abstinence only education to continue my thought streams from above).

That's interesting. My school in Indiana had a gifted program that taught us the rudiments of Basic programming in almost the exact same way. We used to take home grid paper, draw in the pixels where we wanted them, and then write out the code to display them on the screen.

Thus began my life-long love affair with making computers do what I tell them to do. As a 4th grader, even just the exposure of typing words and having graphics show up on the screen was enough to let me know that this was something I would love.

It's a good start but I think it better to focus on getting kids interesting in general math and sciences (of which computer science is a part). The next generation of entrepreneurs need to focus on solving bigger problems and not just focused on making apps. Of course all of it depends on how we can get kids more engaged and interested in learning (whatever subject that moves them).

We have user manuals and documentation for this. One need not devote a public school curriculum to it.

I've taught programming on a volunteer basis to high school kids on behalf of a non-profit in NYC for the past two years. [0]

Rough thoughts:

* This is great news. I'm not the biggest fan of DeBlasio but this is a step in the right direction. There are too many bright and talented kids who never get exposed to computers or the field of programming. Getting to these kids and showing them that they're capable of manipulating the machines they use everyday is huge.

* There needs to be more effort put toward sourcing qualified teachers. I talked about this in more detail in another comment in this thread but a TFA equivalent might be a good idea.

* I'm pleased this is not a mandate to teach all kids programming. I've seen kids in my classroom who are there because they want to be with their friends. There needs to be a small amount of organic interest on the student's part.

* What will the curriculum be? Is it going to be AP CS which has serious issues around it and over-emphasizes theory over practice? I've found that---especially with high school kids---it needs to be fun and have immediate feedback involved (ideally visual).

Sidenote - if you're a programmer who lives in NYC and wants to make an impact now, consider volunteering for ScriptEd (https://scripted.org/).

[0] - http://dopeboy.github.io/teaching-code/