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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

#51

Post by Zakiazigazi »

nihonde wrote: post #21
deciplex wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken, but to clarify I was saying "plot a way forward for Japan to become a tech powerhouse, when a company like Rakuten is about the pinnacle of what they can achieve as far as technology companies go". And you can't really just say "they can do X, Y, and Z" if X, Y, and Z are things that are totally unrealistic to expect Japan corporate culture to do. Even Rakuten is considered "weird" to the point of aposta…

Cookpad also seems to be a nice brain trust of capable coders. It's perplexing to me that Japan isn't better at software. It's practically nerd nation with tons of super talented designers. It feels like it should be easy to push Japan over the tipping point, but who knows why it hasn't happened yet.

Cookpad used to have a lot of foreigners and was considered to be one of the best places to work. From what I heard that has changed about two years ago, now most of the foreigners are gone and what's left is a fairly normal Japanese company with all the cultural aspects that that entails.

To me the average level of developers at most companies I know is just heart-breaking, many times they don't seem to be thinking on the right abstraction levels and instead treat development as something you just persevere through by pure exercise of will (which is of course exactly what you are rewarded for: put in long hours, results don't actually matter as long as you try your best, onboarding/training is limited to manners, how to clean the whiteboard and how to water the plants (not joking), your university education/diploma is considered worthless, hence why lots of people suddenly become "software engineers" with a law degree or a biology degree or an english major degree because tech jobs generally pay better). In the end in my opinion the prevalent culture/values are just not very conducive to becoming better at software (although it kind of works in hardware and on the outside definitely appears to work in services).

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#52

Post by askafriend »

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.

You just described Mathematics.

For the longest time, it was just something I did because people told me to. They judged me on how well I could complete a problem so I did the problems...

I hope to god we don't go down the same path for Programming.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#53

Post by euske »

kendallpark wrote: post #29

It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this will have on their society and industry. I know everyone has their anecdotal opinion as to whether this a good or bad idea, but we really won't know until a decade or so has passed. I'm interested to see whether the gender ratio of programmers will change at all.

This. I would be very much curious too, whether if this can have a cultural impact. If not, I'd say it's largely uninteresting. Sure they'll make a couple of successful developers, but I'd rather want to live in a society where people have proper understanding/respect to tech jobs than the same old society with a few math/programming prodigies.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#54

Post by cpprototypes »

Just a little bit of programming can be powerful. If I were designing an elementary school course, it would focus on two things:

1) How to clean data. Real world data is always dirty. It mixes strings and ints, has commas and quotes where they shouldn't be, etc. Knowing how to think of data in terms of a standard format and having a plan for exceptions is very important.

2) How to manipulate data. Python, JS, or some other simple dynamic language. Teach how to do functional style programming such as list.forEach() to transform or analyze data.

It's easy to make homework and tests for something like this. And these are fundamental skills. It doesn't matter if Python or JS fades away. It doesn't matter if popular formats change from JSON to something else. It's about teaching how to think about data and how to get it in a form where it's easy and reliable to do analysis or transformations with it.

We don't need to make programming "fun". We need to treat it like algebra. A basic skill that all should learn. But that doesn't mean making web pages or mobile apps. And it also doesn't mean the theory focused CS topics like data structures and algorithms. Just start with learning how to think of data in a standard form like CSV or JSON. And how to use a programming language like JS/Python to do something with the data. After students master these skills, it can be integrated into science classes. Students will know how to write simple scripts to clean up the data from a lab test and analyze it.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#55

Post by ploxiln »

wingerlang wrote: post #50
zygomega wrote: post #31

I wish 'programming' included teaching our kids how to be proficient users of technology. How to effectively google, how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine, how to secure your privacy are the type of skills I hope are included in this definition. The architectural and process engineering aspects of programming are better left to learn in adulthood.

> How to effectively google Sounds good > how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine Uhh, even as a developer I barely ever feel I need to do this (and frankly, I do this quite often). Being able to ssh into another machine is extremely low on the list of things to learn before being proficient.

maybe. but text mode is pretty fundamental really. It could be powershell or anything I guess, as long as it had files and commands and was both interactive and scriptable

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#56

Post by programmer_dude »

nihonde wrote: post #27
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.

You make a great point. My experience was the opposite. I desperately wanted to learn more about programming in junior high school, but the math teachers locked all the interesting computers up in their office and really didn't know much about them anyway. This was in the 1980's. Back then, computers were very tightly coupled with math and science, which was incredibly limiting for someone like me who didn't excel in…

> She gave me a C because she couldn't see my work.

Remember when the system is unfair, cheating becomes fair. For example in this case you should have tried to update your program to produce a list of steps showing your work.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#57

Post by goldbrick »

deciplex wrote: post #39
burfog wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 11% of Japan lives in Tokyo, so who cares? It's overpriced anyway. Japan obviously can find a use for software developers. Japan launches spacecraft, has 2 of the 3 major video game console companies, is well-known as a major place for robotics, has major car companies, and has started to get back into military equipment. Programming isn't all about web sites and phone apps.

Tokyo metro is like a quarter of the population of Japan. Japan basically is Tokyo, to a degree that probably isn't matched by any other city / nation on Earth. Even if you insist on just looking at the 23 wards it's a big deal - 7% of the population lives in one of the 23 wards. That's like if 22 million people lived just within the one of the five boroughs of New York. (Comparing Tokyo metro with New York/Newark me…

London metro is greater than a quarter of English population.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#58

Post by kleer001 »

eru wrote: post #42
quxbar wrote: post #23

Wow, in 20 years Japan will be producing some amazing technology. I think people underestimate how transformative an understanding of programmatic problem solving can be. I'd put it only slightly under literacy.

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.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#59

Post by nkozyra »

kendallpark wrote: post #29

It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this will have on their society and industry. I know everyone has their anecdotal opinion as to whether this a good or bad idea, but we really won't know until a decade or so has passed. I'm interested to see whether the gender ratio of programmers will change at all.

The greatest potential effect is demystifying "programming." Simply writing code is quite a different set of skills from being a developer, but to many people even superficially it's magic.

Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

#60

Post by sdlion »

I guess they might be also worried about the low literacy on computer knowledge among their citizens.[1]

More mandatory programming courses could increase existence of desktop/laptop in households. The reference I included says that most people prefer smartphones than desktops/laptops, and programming could be a good enough reason to make them use them.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11758933

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