Obama endorses required high school coding classes

I'm largely of the opinion that aptitude has little to do with anything. It seems that a much bigger problem is our tools for teaching conceptual material are simply terrible. (I'm actually tempted to argue that our tools for teaching a wide variety of material are terrible, but conceptual stuff is especially bad.)

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l...

The link above is an article about how college level students in introductory physics classes have/are failing spectacularly to learn the basic principles of physics. The key parts:

> While most physics students can recite Newton's second law of motion, Harvard's Mazur says, the conceptual test developed by Hestenes showed that after an entire semester they understood only about 14 percent more about the fundamental concepts of physics. When Mazur read the results, he shook his head in disbelief. The test covered such basic material.

> "I gave it to my students only to discover that they didn't do much better," he says.

> The test has now been given to tens of thousands of students around the world and the results are virtually the same everywhere. The traditional lecture-based physics course produces little or no change in most students' fundamental understanding of how the physical world works.

Mazur notes later in the article that after making major changes in his teaching methods and moving away from lectures and towards student group discussions, the students' learned roughly three times as much material. This is a hilariously large increase, and I suspect it to be the low-hanging fruit as far as potential improvements.

A hundred years ago, Maria Montessori developed methods of teaching that are largely the opposite of traditional lecture-based education systems. Students pursue goals largely independently and at their own pace. She developed materials that grounded complex concepts in the real world - my favorite examples of which are the binomial and trinomial cubes. Here's a link that explains how and why the binomial cube, which represents an algebraic (and fairly complex!) concept, is a material provided to 4-5 year old students: http://www.montessoriworld.org/sensory/sbinoml.html

Today, we have computer games that allow us to discard the limits of physical reality. We can create interactive software to teach or prepare students for concepts that might not be possible with physical materials. Why explain the principles of ecology when you could create a simulated, manipulable world that teaches the user simply by interacting with it? Why not have discussions and lectures following this, once the core material has already been presented and experimented with so that the students can begin with at least a partial understanding?

Learning to program doesn't strike me as any more difficult than learning any other subject. Occasional posts show up here about how someone is teaching their child to program - often well before their teen years. What separates those children from the average child other than economic situation and available opportunities?

As I recall from watching it he didn't even bring up the idea himself, he just agreed with someone else and said the idea made sense to him.

To get actual legislation going there needs to be public pressure. Not being an expert I don't know the best way of going about this, but I would think doing it at a local level would be more successful than trying to do it at a federal level. Then if it works well it would spread.

High school is too late. It should happen in 6th-8th grade, but I'm not sure what class you would bump to make that happen. Maybe let it alternate days with foreign language?

The words he used for his actual endorsement didn't scream "MANDATORY CODING" to me: "I want to make sure that (young people) know how to produce stuff using computers and not just consume stuff."

Yes, it could mean coding. But people produce stuff on computers without coding all time. They produce stuff on Photoshop. They produce stuff on Excel. They produce stuff on Wordpress.

It's becoming increasingly clear that economic growth and wage growth are becoming uncorrelated in the US. For example, startups add billions and billions of dollars to the GDP of the US, but we'll never hire the millions of people that got laid off at steel factories over the past twenty years.

The economic model for the US this century is essentially one that consists of high-skilled knowledge workers, high-end manufacturing, and local service workers. Everything else will be subject to economic factors outside of US control. Lower-skilled manufacturing has had a revitalization in the US over the last couple years, but that's mostly due to things like China's currency appreciating, the price of oil remaining high, and a natural gas boom in the US. If any of that changes, those jobs will go back to China. Or Singapore, or Africa, or anywhere else where the supply of raw human capital is cheap.

If you view the future of the US economy in this lens, then everything Obama talks about makes sense. For example, if this is the future, then the safety net programs we had in 1980 are inadequate in 2013. Nobody really debated health insurance in the US in 1980, because over 80% of Americans already received health insurance from their employer. Now it's barely two-thirds [0]. If you have a "top-heavy" skills distribution in the US, and your income is more strongly related to skills than ever, then you need a "top-heavy" tax code. Or you could just let people bleed to death in their bathroom because they tried to pop their own thrombosed hemorrhoid (trust me, don't google it) because they couldn't afford a trip to the ER.

And to tie it back to the OP, it also means education for those high-skilled jobs will be the best way to ensure economic advancement. It's no longer a sure thing to advance economically by putting in your time in at the plant and have your labor union negotiate a 5% raise for you every two years. That doesn't need to mean everyone becomes a programmer. We'll still have manufacturing jobs, but they'll require more than just punching the clock every day[1][2].

We've all probably worked with a self-taught programmer who was toiling away at some crappy job until they either got a degree or made enough web sites to convince a company to hire them. And they probably tripled their income in the process. So I see Obama's statement as saying we should streamline that process as much as we can, and orient our education system to produce as many high-skilled workers as possible.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/study-fewe...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/business/economy/02manufac...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-t...

No problem with it. Consider it a class in logic. Math is mandatory and people still can't figure a tip in their head.