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Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

the-japan-news.com

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Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#131

Post by lloeki »

unabst wrote: post #82
smegel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 J…

You are correct that almost everybody is familiar with English, but that's not speaking it, let alone being fluent. To a degree, English already is part of the Japanese culture and language. But it's a different English. Some of it is compatible, but native speakers are the one's graciously degrading (to use a web programming term) to meet their level, and not them meeting you at a level you're accustomed to speaking…

> You are correct that almost everybody is familiar with English, but that's not speaking it, let alone being fluent.

Compare with a hypothetical Japan where the program would not be put in place and all those people "merely" familiar with English were not at all. It'd be ridiculous to suppose such a plan would lead to 100% (or even 50%) of people being fluent.

> The goal is for fluency,

How many would have not been fluent were it not for the program?

> competency, and the capacity to be competitive at a global level.

Now many (and certainly much more than before) people will have both sufficient English comprehension and sufficient programming exposure to be able to read through foreign code, open issues in open source projects, and possibly even contribute back at some point, nurturing a virtuous feedback loop. Have you ever read core ruby devs? No offense meant but they're hardly "fluent" in English, yet they're able to exchange and contribute with the global community at large.

This is all about raising the bar and giving people more of a chance to stand in a global economy/ecosystem.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#132

Post by imtringued »

wingerlang wrote: post #67
ploxiln wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe. but text mode is pretty fundamental really. It could be powershell or anything I guess, as long as it had files and commands and was both interactive and scriptable

From your perspective maybe. My whole family use computers daily, some do it at work as well I guess and I would bet the number of times they have needed to go into a shell would be exactly zero. I doubt they even know about terminals to be honest. Simply not needed.

I guess we could try to ruin hacker movies by explaining what a terminal in reality is.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#133

Post by imtringued »

minionslave wrote: post #34

Same with teaching French, Piano, Recorder, Photography. It will give people some exposure to something new. Most won't be interested, but a few would have discovered their passion.

I learned english as a third language by actually using it instead of just "learning" it and then get good grades for free.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#134

Post by yaantc »

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…

That may change for English. The problem is that learning a language, particularly when the accent is very different, requires a lot of practice with a good model. When you have a limited number of teachers, with a level not ideal, it's a practical problem. And it's costly. Add to this a culture where people prefer to avoid English if they don't feel confident in their ability, and you have a tough problem to crack.

But technology to the rescue! There's a huge Japanese company called Benesse, doing educational products. They have an English program, one of my kids use it. It's cheap, about $15 per month. The reason is that it's mostly automated: the kid uses an app on a tablet or PC, and his accent in repeating sentences is assessed by the app. All this gamified of course. Then every two weeks he has some time with a human teacher using skype. Looks like the teacher is based in a lower wage country than Japan, which explains the low cost --- which is important to make the system accessible to as many as possible. We'll see the results over the long haul (it's started recently), but I'm already impressed by my kid's accent on the few sentences he knows. And I'm also impressed at how they built such a system. We'll see the effect it will have, but it's an interesting attempt at improving things.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#135

Post by imtringued »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #71
kiba wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If we didn't have an English class in an English speaking country nobody would know how to write.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#136

Post by facepalm »

I think it is OK to do this. When I was in elementary school, we also learned knitting. Why not programming, too? Some basic skill that could be useful at times.

However, seeing how abysmal general knowledge of mathematics is (in Western countries, don't know about Japan), I wouldn't expect huge numbers of skilled coders to emerge from school because of the inclusion of the subject.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#137

Post by imtringued »

nkozyra wrote: post #19
deciplex wrote: post #4

Maybe they should also find something for those programmers to do as well, while they're at it. The job market for software engineering in Tokyo is equivalent to a Minneapolis or an Atlanta even with 20x the population - and even then I might be overselling it. Look at the culture and the accomplishments of a place like Rakuten, and plot a way forward from that to a tech powerhouse. I don't see it.

I'd guess mandatory programming languages won't have much impact on the amount of people who go into programming as a profession. I'm torn on the utility of it; unless you're actively working in it the information degrades very quickly. And unlike spoken languages, if you try to come back to it later very little of what you learned before is still valid. Classes on general computing - and not "coding" - would seem fa…

>And unlike spoken languages,

Spoken languages do change but you may only notice when you're already in your 70s.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#138

Post by imtringued »

burfog wrote: post #33
nihonde wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cookpad also seems to be a nice brain trust of capable coders. It's perplexing to me that Japan isn't better at software. It's practically nerd nation with tons of super talented designers. It feels like it should be easy to push Japan over the tipping point, but who knows why it hasn't happened yet.

Programming isn't just web sites and phone apps!!! Japan is the source of the world's most popular operating system, iTRON. Never heard of iTRON? Ah, well, it's probably in your microwave or anti-lock brakes or thermostat or coffeemaker or ...

Hardware requires a big upfront investment. You can write a phone app at home and companies can test the waters with a cheap MVP.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#139

Post by DasIch »

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.

There wouldn't be less demand, there would be a higher supply.

In any case IoT is doing it's best to massively increase demand for programmers. Once everything is sufficiently IoTified programming will be as common a tool as a hammer.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#140

Post by newjersey »

marak830 wrote: post #101
bitJericho wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wonderful English teacher gave extra credit on correcting her own worksheets.

That is a genius idea. I might float it past one of my head English teachers!

We had the same in the differential equations class. Attention and participation jumped and stayed up. Very interesting.
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