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President Obama calls on every American to learn code

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Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#171

Post by jkn »

Steko wrote: post #132

Kevin Drum (spoilers: knows how to code) had the best take on this: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/no-everyone-do... But wait. The link leads me to a fairly routine presidential video in honor of Computer Science Education Week, in which President Obama encourages kids to take computer science classes. "It's important for our country's future," he says. But I imagine he's cut dozen of videos for every…

I think most importantly it's about being computer-literate in a broader sense. Introducing kids to programming should be seen as a general knowledge matter. We introduce children to many fields so that they understand better the world they live in. Coding should be no exception, especially as computing becomes ever more dominant in our society. An introduction to programming would give children the basic vocabulary to understand what it's all about, and maybe the idea to go further when they need to or want to. Importantly, it also serves to demystify the field: a child might feel that programming is way beyond her reach, maybe requiring a significant technical background and complex and expensive tools to do anything? She might look at it differently when she discovers what she can do with Notepad, a browser and 20 lines of Javascript.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#173

Post by botagrape »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #163
wes-exp wrote: post #150

It's easy to point to the feel-good topic of education and cry foul when anyone is against it. But here is the reality. America already overproduces scientists and engineers. The whole notion of talent shortages is generally hot air from special interests (in this case, tech companies) who want a cheaper supply of labor and cannot bear the idea that skilled engineers actually cost a lot. A lot of effort is put into t…

America already overproduces scientists and engineers. Out of curiosity, do you have a link to any evidence or supporting materials to this claim? It's the first I've heard of it.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#174

Post by vezzy-fnord »

Personally I find the contemporary "learn to code movement" to be asinine for several reasons:

1) It supports affirmative action and seeks to set sex quotas. (http://slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/187255/codeorg-more-money...)

2) It offers a very sugar-coated and frankly nauseating view of "coding". It adulates this mysterious and powerful essence dubbed only as "code" and is highly biased towards the imperative paradigm. Notice how they rarely use the word "programming", but rather it's always "code". This signifies that they value parroting instructions more over actual understanding.

3) The testimonials by all sorts of celebrities are simply ridiculous and laughable. So many actors, musicians, sports players, politicians and business moguls, but barely any actual computer scientists.

4) The way they present their entire campaign, and considering who backs it, leads me to believe that their motive is not to foster computer science education, so much as to teach people just enough skills to be a 9-to-5 code monkey that can write instructions in Java or some $EnterpriseLanguage. Cheap, disposable labor.

5) Absolutely no focus on software freedom and ethics, of course.

6) Another possible outcome is that by making computer science (rather merely coding in this case) a mandatory subject, they'll end up alienating many kids from it. This depends on the aptitude of the educators, but it's safe to assume it won't be too good.

7) This is arguable, but merely learning to code basic programs doesn't really offer too much insight into the complex process that is software development. The educational value in writing Ruby (used here as an example), while not void, is not that great by itself. Programming languages and natural languages have this thing in common: they're different. Ruby isn't Haskell.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#175

Post by ommunist »

We've seen that before when in 90-ies everybody tried to learn some Visual Basic and later some Java. Maybe I am wrong, but programming require quite a systematic effort in knowledge acquisition, lots of practice and a good mentor. I also think community is not a substitute for mentorship, well it is a superset of it one may say, nevertheless.

When a politician asks everyne to learn how to code, I assume it is already too late for everyone to do it. There are more smart kids in India with IQ more than 100 than there are kids in the US in total.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#177

Post by JshWright »

Steko wrote: post #132

Kevin Drum (spoilers: knows how to code) had the best take on this: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/no-everyone-do... But wait. The link leads me to a fairly routine presidential video in honor of Computer Science Education Week, in which President Obama encourages kids to take computer science classes. "It's important for our country's future," he says. But I imagine he's cut dozen of videos for every…

> But coding? Unless it's part of your job, the odds are vanishingly small that it will ever be of much use to you.

It's silly to reduce this to "Programming is useless outside of STEM". I once saved an admin assistant _days_ of work because I happened to stop by her desk to chat and noticed the task she was doing (combining some spreadsheets) would be trivial to automate. She had estimated at the rate she was going, she had 17 hours of work left.

I'm not suggesting she should know how to write script to parse and combine a bunch of csv's... But a basic 'literacy' in programming would have at least let her know there was a better way...

I have plenty of similar anecdotes, and I would guess many of you do as well...

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#178

Post by jmduke »

anonu wrote: post #110
jmduke wrote: post #21

A lot of people are getting attached to the "every American" aspect of things, and I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Amateur programming (for lack of a better term) like basic Python for data analysis or HTML/CSS to work on Wordpress sites (Hell, one of my friends who's a Social Media Manager learned Python to create some QoL scripts for her day-to-d…

>> QoL scripts Whats QoL? Quality of Life?

Correct. Specifically, she used TweePy to grab recent followers/unfollowers and try and mine some basic information (bio, loc, etc.)

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#179

Post by chacham15 »

pmichaud wrote: post #151
Steko wrote: post #132

Kevin Drum (spoilers: knows how to code) had the best take on this: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/no-everyone-do... But wait. The link leads me to a fairly routine presidential video in honor of Computer Science Education Week, in which President Obama encourages kids to take computer science classes. "It's important for our country's future," he says. But I imagine he's cut dozen of videos for every…

I don't agree with Kevin. It's true that you can function without programming, but it's also true that being able to program could improve pretty much any job. Even a janitor could develop, say, a logistics application to optimize his path through the building he cleans, or build a roomba to vacuum for him. And more broadly, I really do think programming improves the quality of my thoughts. I remember when I was 10 o…

> Even a janitor could develop, say, a logistics application to optimize his path through the building he cleans, or build a roomba to vacuum for him.

Those require a lot of effort (and required knowledge) for minimal returns. A better example might be a janitor could make a web-app which lets himself/others note what places need to be cleaned, what time they were cleaned, and then potentially notice patterns that might help him find a source of the problem, minimize the response time, etc. I feel like that kind of a thing might be more useful and given the right tools/frameworks, might not even be all that difficult to implement.

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