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Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

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Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#161

Post by corecoder »

danbruc wrote: post #112

I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be d…

> Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up?

As you note, software influences our lives in a much deeper way than internal combustion engines and transistors, and this will only become more and more true as time passes, so I think this may be useful.

I don't expect most students to become programmers; I hope they'll grasp some software concepts, the most important being (IMO) that software isn't magic, and has limitations and costs.

People could get away with thinking that internal combustion engines and transistors were magic with far less consequences than thinking that software is magic.

Btw, they did teach me how an internal combustion engine and a transistor work, at school—not to a professional level, but enough to understand the basics.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#162

Post by LionessLover »

kleer001 wrote: post #58
eru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, that doesn't mean that mandatory teaching will make people competent at it. (We have pretty widespread teaching of programming in high schools in Germany. Doesn't help too much.)

Does it seem to help much at all with the political sphere? In US politicos seem to me to be pretty ignorant of some of the finer points, but that may be an age thing too.

Politicians will start being competent as soon as the populace giving them jobs values that trait enough.

That also includes keeping the loudly howling minorities for any given topic in check that raises hell whenever a person in public view seems to disagree with them, thereby teaching such people that lying and pretending is the best option.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#163

Post by LionessLover »

venomsnake wrote: post #93
ekianjo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had mandatory programming in france 30 years ago it did not create a generation of little geniuses.

And in Eastern Europe we had a system of dedicated STEM schools that took kids with aptitude to extend their abilities and now the region is an IT powerhouse. YMMV.

That has nothing to do with you guys being very cheap, right?

No argument that STEM education was good in the East - I even have proof. Immediately after reunification German magazine "Wirtschaftswoche" (Businessweek equivalent) sponsored a very big test of students who had just finished high school "Abitur" in Germany) in East and in West Germany. It was tens of thousands of students. The result was that East German students wre significantly better in everything STEM, and worse in "language" (not just English, also in the use of their own language - so they were good engineers and bad at marketing and PR, to translate it to job profiles).

However, that is not nearly enough for success, the main reason Western firms outsource to the East is price. Competence is necessary but not sufficient. Most of the software boom in the East is fueled by demand from the West.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#164

Post by optforfon »

jimbokun wrote: post #159
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…

"In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks." Spoken fluency sucks. Reading and writing English is much better. When I lived in Japan, and eventually achieved some basic fluency in speaking Japanese, communicating with my coworkers often consisted of English vocabulary, in sentences using Japanese pronunciation and grammar. The reason for this is simple. They had plenty of access to English wr…

The lack of people to talk to is definitely the number one reason their English proficiency plunges after school/college, however in my rather limited experience their reading isn't great. Like you say they have decent vocabularies, but they really try to avoid actually reading English text.

I was working with some researchers for a couple of months and I was fascinated how they have their own world of scientific publications. You could be a totally competent scientists or engineer and not know a lick of English.

They'd really only go to English publications as a last resort, and people I'd guess weren't under a ton of pressure to publish in English either.

Since then I've actually noticed this is a trend in larger countries. There is some kind of critical mass of people which once reached makes them completely capable of living in a linguistic bubble. Mostly this is simply a question of how variety of media you have available to consume. Once it's high enough and you have the major western stuff dubbed, you can kinda cost with your local language. Compare something like Poland (where surprisingly few people speak English) and some place like Estonia (where everyone speaks English)

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#165

Post by nextos »

corecoder wrote: post #158
Morgawr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 on…

Similar experience, except I did some mocking (just a little bit!); the course (Pascal, mostly) was not great, but I'd say it was useful, and students did learn something.

I think Pascal is not the right choice.

My not-so-visionary private European school taught us Logo (a Lisp dialect) during kindergarden and primary years. I vividly recall playing with recursion when I was 9.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#166

Post by kazagistar »

ThomPete wrote: post #155
Zklsalue8 wrote: post #151

Math is such a wonderful and useful invention. Making people learn mathematics at school has made everyone love mathematics, take it up professionally, and become skilled mathematicians... You see my point. Most people hate math because of their experiences with it in school. I see the same thing happening with coding. It's gonna turn more people away from it than it ever turns onto it. May even do more net damage th…

Learning to program is a very very different thing. You can use programming to learn math and play games and mix the two. My son loves learning programming. He isn't learning it like you and i learned math. He is playing it. Adjusting it, slowly understanding the concepts of loops, if/then etc. conceptually, later literally. So at least I don't se your point :)

The point is that you can play and experiment with math. But compulsory education turns it into pointless shitty drills that make most students hate it.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#167

Post by Morgawr »

LionessLover wrote: post #160
Morgawr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 on…

When you are a "TA" - which you basically were, according to your description - then of course you learn a lot. I've been a TA myself, and that alone gives one a very big boost because you spend a lot of time researching and solving problems - and it's fun because you are motivated like hell. However, that says nothing - nothing at all - about the experience of everybody else in the course.

Keep in mind I really wasn't a TA. I was a normal student learning the material with the rest of the class and taking exams, doing projects and getting scolded by the teacher as was everyone else. Most of my extra "teaching" was from study groups with my peers and people simply asking me for help during lab sessions because I would simply finish my task in the first 10-20 minutes of class and then I'd either have fun online on flash games, work on my personal projects or simply laze around for the rest of the class (usually 2 hours lab classes) so.. might as well help if people need me. That's a big difference, a "TA" or authority figure usually is more intimidating and less relateable for young students, where an actual peer is more likely to keep them interested and have them learn.

But yeah this is as I said an outlier.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#168

Post by kazagistar »

cderwin wrote: post #109
sotojuan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can apply this logic to almost all subjects in school aside from the very basic ones (math, reading/writing) and even then you can argue school need not be teaching at a high level. > I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow. We shove kids into biology, chemistry, physics, literature, art, etc. The ones that like it will make it their career…

Or it could go the way of math, hated but all but the very most talented at it and generally considered boring. This has very real effects on the discipline, including a more exaggerated gender problem that CS has already inherited, and a number of extremely intelligent people are conditioned to never really give it a chance.

> including a more exaggerated gender problem that CS has

I'll need a citation for that, since last I checked, math had more females then CS and Physics.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#169

Post by ThomPete »

kazagistar wrote: post #166
ThomPete wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to program is a very very different thing. You can use programming to learn math and play games and mix the two. My son loves learning programming. He isn't learning it like you and i learned math. He is playing it. Adjusting it, slowly understanding the concepts of loops, if/then etc. conceptually, later literally. So at least I don't se your point :)

The point is that you can play and experiment with math. But compulsory education turns it into pointless shitty drills that make most students hate it.

That completely depends on how education of it is executed.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#170

Post by mcbits »

Zklsalue8 wrote: post #151

Math is such a wonderful and useful invention. Making people learn mathematics at school has made everyone love mathematics, take it up professionally, and become skilled mathematicians... You see my point. Most people hate math because of their experiences with it in school. I see the same thing happening with coding. It's gonna turn more people away from it than it ever turns onto it. May even do more net damage th…

Are there any public schools where mathematics is completely optional, so we can compare the proportion of those students who move on to mathy occupations (and how well the others do in life with no math education whatsoever)?

It might be better to think of programming more like a digital shop class. Not every high school graduate will be a welder or cabinet maker, but we do expect them to be able to build and repair simple items without losing a limb. For the last 15 years, it's like everyone has had a full-featured digital machine shop in their home and didn't even know it was there, much less how to use it.

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