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New York Mayor De Blasio to Require Computer Science in Schools

nytimes.com

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

#71

Post by nv-vn »

danso wrote: post #58
bweitzman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a fundamental difference between programing and literacy. Written language is a medium whereas programs are tools. Programming seems more similar to car mechanics to me. When the car was first introduced, everybody who owned one knew exactly how it worked and how to fix it. Partly because they were simpler and partly because the early adopter were just more interested. Over time, as the complexity and…

I have to disagree. A car mechanic is akin to a car as a tech support or sysadmin is to a computer. Some tech support people know far more than I do about fixing a computer, even if they aren't programmers. It's been about a couple decades since I wrote my first for-loops and if-statements in Qbasic...but even though computers have grown exponentially, not just in pure power, but in influence and capability -- I use…

As much as programming required the same code over and over, there's still a whole lot of thinking that needs to be applied - at the core, there's the need to think like a computer just to solve the problem itself; on top of that there's a layer of understanding required to debug to make it more than just bruteforcong; and then there's a layer of understanding the fundamentals of the underlying architecture in order to be able to reason how to solve a problem in a fast, reliable, and efficient way. While a traditional programming class can teach how to write code, and maybe even how to solve basic problems on your own, a few short programming tutorials isn't enough to get most people into the right mind-set to go on learning the rest on their own, nor is it usually enough for them to be able to go out and write a full program from scratch.

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

#72

Post by jboggan »

blister wrote: post #34
jboggan wrote: post #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…

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…

I'm guessing it was some sort of standard lesson plan. The problem wasn't with the lesson plan so much as it was being taught by someone who didn't really understand or wasn't personally moved by code.

At that age I was the same kid who typed random characters in my Apple IIe at home pretending to be the G.I. Joe "Sci-Fi" who was "hacking" the Cobra Terrordrome. But somehow the static pixel assignment came across as the slowest coloring book ever and I didn't get the point of it at all. What I would have done for a reference manual or any bit of the internet back then.

I remember hacking Logowriter to trace out a clock's second hand in 6 degree increments over the course of a minute, but my regular teacher thought it was stupid and told me to finish the assignment drawing squares.

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

#73

Post by deciplex »

jboggan wrote: post #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…

When I was 11 or so we had a class where the teacher spent probably a total of 10 days of the year doing instruction, and the rest of it he just cut us loose on a bunch of late 80s-era Macs, with a few games, a word processor, and Hypercard installed.

We were allowed to play games a bit if we were bored, but otherwise we either had to write something, or make stacks. I mostly made stacks, and while I stuck to the visual tools in Hypercard at first, once I realized how much more I could do actually writing the code myself I got pretty into it. I didn't actually realize I had been doing computer programming until years later.

That might be the most influential class I ever took, looking back 25 years later, and it was so mostly because the teacher got the hell out of the way and let us be kids. Also, I miss Hypercard :-)

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

#74

Post by calibraxis »

ploxiln wrote: post #33
jboggan wrote: post #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…

By that logic, they shouldn't teach math or english either. (EDIT: maybe just math is the really good example here)

Yeah, people end up hating Shakespeare and polynomials.

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

#75

Post by bobbles »

userbinator wrote: post #15
danso wrote: 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…

>The walled gardens of app stores have also grown to the point where simply sharing an executable with someone has become an almost taboo act, with some central authority telling the users who to trust.

This is entirely because of malicious people ruining it for everyone though, not necessarily that the app stores just have the monopoly

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

#77

Post by cm2187 »

dopeboy wrote: post #25
cm2187 wrote: 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.

They could learn the basics of HTML, CSS and javascript when covering browsers. But to me it is equally important to understand why https and certificates matter, how email works, what's a DNS, a router, what's the difference between an IP and a Port, between RAM and ROM, CPU and GPU.

And even very basic skills like using Excel, Word and Powerpoint.

Programming to me is an advanced topic in computer literacy.

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

#78

Post by newy »

ytpete wrote: post #62
dopeboy wrote: post #40

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 manipu…

> it needs to be fun and have immediate feedback involved (ideally visual) This is so huge - it's not just that it's exciting for students and a more rewarding way to show friends & family what you're studying. It's also a great overview of the field: AI, graphics, data structures, performance, network programming, discrete mathematics, concurrency, on and on. You never know what's going to resonate with someone and…

> I worked with a professor who struggled for years to get a game programming course

Was this at Cornell? Sounds familiar.

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

#79

Post by dougabug »

throwaway420 wrote: post #10

* Getting a little exposure to it is wonderful and valuable for all. But I believe that being good at computer science requires having some skill at a type of abstract thinking that many people, even otherwise really intelligent people, don't possess. If this ever becomes mandatory for all students, I believe that it will be a recipe for a lot of wasted time and frustration. * If it ever becomes mandatory, I also won…

The assumption that the general public is dumb and must be protected from difficult subjects/intellectual work, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Removing everything from the curriculum that "a lot of people are bad at" is a bad idea. Most people are bad at something, there's nothing wrong with trying and failing; what's wrong is not trying when there's so much possibility that might be unlocked in people's minds.

The ability to program, to debug logic, to understand algorithms brought to the general public could be the biggest cognitive advance to society at large since free compulsory education. Frankly, most people take classes in geometry, trig, linear algebra and calculus which never really gels in their brains and they never productively use in their adult lives. Learning how to make computers solve problems elevates and empowers the mind.

Let's suppose that only a third of the population every becomes halfway proficient at writing software. That will be 2.5 billion people! With that many computer literate people in the world, finding teachers for the subject will not be difficult. I wouldn't worry about bright young hackers being crowded out by the dull masses; young hackers have been teaching themselves since there were close to zero teachers who could code.

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

#80

Post by monort »

ploxiln wrote: post #33
jboggan wrote: post #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…

By that logic, they shouldn't teach math or english either. (EDIT: maybe just math is the really good example here)

If you think it's important to teach math to uninterested pupil, take a look at the results of PIAAC adult skills survey:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51bb74b8e4b0139570ddf...

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