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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

#141

Post by terda12 »

roel_v wrote: post #110
Olscore wrote: post #8

This may not be a good idea. Code is one of those things that by itself sucks until you have a reason or purpose to use it. I started learning coding around age ~9 in 1996 or so. But what got me hooked was websites, because I could use the code to build fan sites or accomplish real, purposeful tasks. I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow.

In the UK it's called 'computational thinking', which much better covers what such a curriculum is about. Parts of it can be done without a computer at all; a 'bubble sort dance' for example (getting students to sort themselves from small to tall with an algorithm).

Honestly that sort of knowledge would only be useful for a computer science college student. I don't see any real point in teaching it to high school students. Most people don't care about maximizing their sorting when Excel does the sorting for you.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#142

Post by [deleted] »

imtringued wrote: post #137
nkozyra wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#143

Post by nkozyra »

imtringued wrote: post #137
nkozyra wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

:)

I guess the Fortran programmers from 1960 might be at least somewhat familiar with Fortran 2008, but I suspect the gulf would be wider than a spoken language change. If I watch an episode of the honeymooners, the parts I don't understand are cultural, not linguistic.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#144

Post by emptyfile »

Had obligatory programming classes in my eastern european science gymnasium (high school). We worked in Pascal and my younger sister goes to the same school now and works in Python.

Like any other class kids who were interested in it did good and most of them went to CS colleges, 90% who didn't care memorized it without thinking got a passing grade and never thought about it again, same with logic, psychology, sociology, philosophy, chemistry or any number of other obligatory classes we were forced to take.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#145

Post by Morgawr »

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…

>From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them.

As somebody who had programming classes (first Pascal and then Java) throughout all my highschool being taught by a Math teacher who never really programmed other than the basics and the textbook stuff... I can tell you that I'm still glad we had the chance. Since day one I already knew more than the material and arguably than our teacher (before Highschool I'd been dabbling with PHP and C programming for web-related stuff as a hobby and as I kept going I was also doing extra stuff on the side while going to school so I never stopped being ahead).

I spent most of my programming classes in Highschool helping my friends and my teacher with stuff they didn't understand, correcting her (my teacher) whenever she got something wrong, no mocking. This kind of experience really made me become a better programmer and mentor for my peers, helped them improve and really enjoy the material (being taught by an enthusiastic peer has a much more positive effect than being taught by a borderline incompetent adult).

Most likely this experience is an outlier case, however I wanted to point out that by simply introducing programming classes is a great starting point towards fostering a more positive environment for the skilled student to thrive and for the less-skilled students to at least pick up something.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#146

Post by brianzelip »

Interesting point at the end:

> How teachers can acquire the necessary knowledge and teaching expertise will be the biggest hurdle for Japan to clear before computer programming becomes a required subject at school.

Developing the skills in teachers is an issue.

I think all of this effort towards learning to program is great. Good learning resources like [FreeCodeCamp](https://freecodecamp.com) are just going to keep getting better.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#147

Post by Morgawr »

terda12 wrote: post #141
roel_v wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK it's called 'computational thinking', which much better covers what such a curriculum is about. Parts of it can be done without a computer at all; a 'bubble sort dance' for example (getting students to sort themselves from small to tall with an algorithm).

Honestly that sort of knowledge would only be useful for a computer science college student. I don't see any real point in teaching it to high school students. Most people don't care about maximizing their sorting when Excel does the sorting for you.

It's about critical thinking, it's not a class to teach children how to sort things... I'm really surprised to see a comment like this on this website.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#148

Post by Morgawr »

wingerlang wrote: post #128
burfog wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem needed because you aren't used to what you can do with it. If you were good at it, you'd be horrified at the thought of not having that capability. It's not just about launching programs and moving files around one by one. A decent shell, like bash, is fully programmable. It lets you express yourself in ways that no GUI does, possibly excepting LabView or Scratch.

I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user). I also think that even if this was taught from the beginning - it'd remain a power user thing. But I agree, I use automati…

>I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user).

I agree with you but you couldn't have chosen a worse example. Mass renaming, tagging or formatting of files is one of the most performed operations of an everyday user and is a massive time sink for people who don't know how to programmatically do it.

Classification of downloaded music or movies is very common. Same goes for moving files around and renaming folders and mass-moving documents. I remember when I had to re-format around 1000 images for a friend of mine because he wanted a different size + format to create some photo album. Just a couple of imagemagick lines vs him and I manually spending a lot of hours doing it painstakingly picture by picture.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#149

Post by sdroz »

If this does go smoothly (and I hope it does), I imagine an issue being the bottleneck of higher education.

I go to school at a top CS university in America and the demand for CS classes has far surpassed the supply. Students are waitlisted in the 50s-100s for CS classes they need to take for the major. What is going to happen when the influx of CS students increases 2x, 5x..?

Hopefully higher-ed will figure it out before then.

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