ACM Urges Obama To Include Computer Science in k-12 Education

Also, here's something you many not know. K-12 CS education in India is actually pretty good. My school started computer science in the fifth grade. Internalizing the Turing machine (even if it is not formally explained) at that age gives you a huge advantage should you decide to become a computer scientist later.

So how come India doesn't produce good computer scientists? Actually we do. If you look at the top CS conferences, the proportion of Indians is pretty high compared to the number of people we graduate. It's just that Indians choose to move to the U.S. to do research because there are no good government funded research programs in India.

Next up, innovation and design. I think PG pretty much answered that one. It doesn't matter if you have talented people, if you don't have a nurturing environment like Silicon Valley, it's just not gonna happen. There's not much incentive for an Indian firm to innovate because our business climate is just so bad. Success depends more on how well you can bribe government officials than on innovation.

That leaves coding jobs. If you teach everyone how to code, of course you're going to have a lot of coders who aren't particularly good designers or computer scientists. That's what we have. Many of my friends who are actually good tried to kick it in one of the outsourcing firms, couldn't take the boredom, and left to go to grad school or do something else. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

To summarize: K-12 CS education is not hard, and it's important for producing good computer scientists. You just have to be prepared to accept that not every kid will be interested.

Actuaries, quant finance (it's not dead yet), crypto-related programming, logistics... there are lots of non-academic jobs (most of which pay better than all but the best academic appointments). It may be the case that giving up four years of earnings is not worth it from a purely pecuniary standpoint, but I seriously doubt that there is an overabundance of math PhDs given the jobs they can take.

The private sector is, of course, much less visible than academia.

I'm a highschooler (junior now), and I took an intro Java class freshman year, AP Comp Sci soph year, and I'm TAing a Java class right now.

There is very little learning of Java going on in any of those classes. Part of it is that the teacher doesn't make it a very hard class, but also even among the people who try and do all of the assignments the majority just don't get it. They don't get the simplest things.

And it's not that my school gets a lot of people who just are "stupid" or unmotivated. It's a charter school that you have to apply to and take a test to get in. Its focus is math, science, and tech, and it's like 42nd (something close at least) public HS in the nation according to US News and World Report.

But a lot of them just don't understand programming. They have functions explained to them, and they're shown some examples like areaOfSquare(int side) and areaOfRectangle(int length, int width), and half of them ask me for help on the first one areaOfTriangle(int base, int height). And most of the rest ask the people that I helped for help.

Or I fix a curly brace issue (I hate Java, for the record (ok, hate's too strong)) for the same person almost every day, but she can't figure out that maybe she should try adding a curly brace to the end of the file before calling me over.

This incompetence is even more true now that Java is offered to all freshmen. For my freshman year, unless one did a very long, annoying, inane set of assignments to show that you know how to use MS Office, freshmen had to take a class teaching them how to use Office freshman year, and only after that could they take Java. So the people in Java were people who actually wanted to take it, not just people trying to fulfill their graduation requirements.

Back then, about half of the people in Java actually tried (the rest were basically the seniors who had stopped caring), and around half of the nonseniors who took Java would go on to take AP CS.

The ratios have tilted a lot more towards incompetence now.

Programming is something that not everyone understands, and teaching those that just don't understand programming is a monumental task.

All schools should offer at least one programming class, but making it a "Core Component Of Science And Math Education" is a mistake. A lot of people would just do badly and not learn anything.