Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

the-japan-news.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 195 posts

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#71

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

kiba wrote: post #30
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think English was useless too until I had to read other people's documentation. The world would be a better place if smart programmers were also competent at writing documentation and comments. I've seen crazy things like punctuation placed in the middle of a sentence. I had to ask, "Is this one sentence or two?" People not using appropriate paragraphs, no headings, rambling sentences etc ... A little bit o…

I didn't say English is a useless language. It's a very useful language, but I doubt a Japanese classroom is a good place to become a good English speaker and user.

Wait, are you talking about teaching English in Japan?

I read that as teaching an English class in an English speaking country!

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#72

Post by smegel »

unabst wrote: post #68

In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that…

> yet, English fluency sucks

That is totally not my experience. I have travelled widely in Asia and Japan easily had the best English fluency across a range of people I conversed with (well apart from Singapore but that doesn't count).

Compared to Korea/Taiwan, Japan was a breeze, even in HK I had trouble with shopkeeps outside of areas heavily frequented by westerners. I travelled to some pretty far flung areas of Japan, and was always able to get by with basic English, and even had some quite deep conversations with a traditional inn owner who had only had a handful of western guests in the 20+ years he had been running the place. How he kept up his fluency without anyone to talk to was a mystery to me.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#73

Post by r0fls »

chucksmash wrote: post #62
r0fls wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say you started learning at 9 -- I started much later and regret it -- why not get others started sooner?

What age much later than nine years old did you begin programming?

Well I tried to teach myself during high school and college but mostly learned after graduating. I always wanted to learn but my HS didn't have the resources and I felt behind by college. So I got a degree in math and have been struggling to play catch up still :) it's going good anyway but I surely would have enjoyed having something deeper than Excel back then. In middle school and high school I did have basic tech stuff like that.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#74

Post by bronz »

dont get me wrong, i will never go against any kind of improvement or expansion of basic education. However, seeing how i have invested quite a lot of time and money into my computer science degree (finishing up in about a year), i am a little concerned that soon programming is going be devalued as a profession because of programs like these. is that wrong? also they said that they have been doing this in isreal since 2000, anybody know how that turned out?

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#75

Post by sbuttgereit »

simunaga wrote: post #66
Zakiazigazi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how long English has been mandatory and what the average level of English proficiency actually is, it might be a little too early to be overly optimistic. The potential is there, but it will depend mostly on the execution and based on current experience I wouldn't expect too much.

Why be optimistic at all? The more people are able to code, the less demand for it, the less salaries of the programmers.

Gotta be pedantic on this one...

Demand wouldn't decrease because of more developers being on the market. Supply would increase. Just because any one developer might be individually in less demand doesn't mean that demand for developers has decreased. Yes, this would still depress salaries for developers.

Having said that, there is no fixed amount demand for developers. If development resources are a bottleneck for development projects moving forward, there being more developers may actually increase demand. This comes about as projects that otherwise wouldn't be started do get started and may, themselves, not be able to be fully staffed even with the new blood. I don't know that this would actually happen... but then again I suspect the Japanese don't really know what will happen either.

You can't just look at the two values of current demand and current supply and extrapolate that into a vision of the future... there are many, many more variables than that.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#76

Post by marak830 »

unabst wrote: post #68

In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that…

As an English teacher I'm seeing a lot of change in the new generation of teachers.

I teach high school student part time (so I can work on my side project), and the teachers over the age of 40ish have pretty terrible English(these are English teachers), but all of the newer ones have pretty good levels.

I have even been notified a few teachers are going to the US for a few weeks to get immersed in English as a sort of brush up.

The biggest issue I see so far is the lack of checking of foreign teachers, I work with a few whose work sheets for the students are riddled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar.

Edit: typo(haha sigh).

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#77

Post by chdhxhhd »

quxbar wrote: post #23

Wow, in 20 years Japan will be producing some amazing technology. I think people underestimate how transformative an understanding of programmatic problem solving can be. I'd put it only slightly under literacy.

>Wow, in 20 years Japan will be producing some amazing technology

Like more javascript frameworks?

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#78

Post by marak830 »

reddotX wrote: post #70
unabst wrote: post #68

In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that…

if they are so progressive they could hire teachers over the internet (form USA, UK, Australia etc)

Well they do for English - at least the companies that have the contracts do.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#79

Post by adrianN »

marak830 wrote: post #76
unabst wrote: post #68

In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that…

As an English teacher I'm seeing a lot of change in the new generation of teachers. I teach high school student part time (so I can work on my side project), and the teachers over the age of 40ish have pretty terrible English(these are English teachers), but all of the newer ones have pretty good levels. I have even been notified a few teachers are going to the US for a few weeks to get immersed in English as a sort…

> whose work sheets

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#80

Post by marak830 »

unabst wrote: post #69
askafriend wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described Mathematics. For the longest time, it was just something I did because people told me to. They judged me on how well I could complete a problem so I did the problems... I hope to god we don't go down the same path for Programming.

He also just described English education in Japan. Students just complete problems, and even those that do well never learn to speak English just through these classes.

Yeah the conversation schools seem that way, I'm seeing more of a trend towards more classes and general communication though. There isn't much of a reason for those conversation schools to do better though, they rarely get called out(from what I've seen anyway).
Post reply on HN