Obama endorses required high school coding classes • Hacker News Board

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#61

Post by yummyfajitas » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 12:13 PM UTC

nhashem wrote: post #47

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…

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].

This is nonsensical, since a lot less than 80% of Americans even had an employer in the 80's (or even today).

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO

The uninsured rate has actually remained roughly flat at 15%.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AU.S._Uninsured_and_...

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.

This is really unclear. For example, if education is primarily about signalling rather than skills (lots of evidence suggests it is [1]), all you do is waste resources on a signalling arms race.

[1] There is a fairly extensive literature about forgetting stuff. Bryan Caplan has written a fair bit about it, for example, and even has a book on the way: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/does_high_schoo.... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/11/the_present_val_... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons....

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#62

Post by ameister14 » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 12:14 PM UTC

dizzystar wrote: post #51

danilocampos wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask again: What about computer literacy, at the level of understanding the software that makes such devices work, makes it less valid than history, science or mathematics as a required field of study? Put your fingers in your ears if you'd like, the crucial point is that we've already got a system where you have to learn things you don't necessarily want to learn. What is it about the most important growth subject…

I'm not arguing against teaching students to use their computer as a tool. I'm arguing against programming specifically... When people that spend thousands of dollars to learn programming can't even do simple coding exercises, what makes you think a high school student struggling under the current workload will do? http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...

I don't think learning to code is fundamentally more difficult than learning Spanish. I taught myself both and they took about the same amount of time and effort.

High school students take Spanish. Why not programming?

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#63

Post by jvehent » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:01 PM UTC

I've grown to believe that learning to code is similar to what learning to write was 200 years ago. You can't be a good engineer, scientist or even artist without knowing it. A few people who excel at it will have great impact on our society. Within 50 years, every single kids out of high school will know the basics of it, or have very limited choice in higher education.

This is a good thing. Do your kids a favor, teach them how to code.

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#64

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:09 PM UTC

sparkygoblue wrote: post #2

I've been teaching computer programming to high school students for close to 15 years. In that time, I've seen the demand grow more and more as the stigmatism of computer programming being a "geeky" or "uncool" pursuit has slowly dissipated. The types of skills taught in computer programming courses -- abstraction, high-level problem solving, complex logic -- are ones I believe all students should have some level of…

I wonder if trying to cram all those meta-skills into topical classes is part of the problem.

It would be interesting to see an academic track high school program that included some sort of project academy, where the instructor was more of a mentor that guided the student through finding, examining and solving a problem that they found interesting.

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#65

Post by froglet » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:20 PM UTC

Nationwide pre k would be much more helpful than required coding in HS.

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#66

Post by noahl » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:23 PM UTC

jchan wrote: post #3

It seems to me like a lot of the "required coding class" idea is based on a misguided desire to increase the competitiveness of our country internationally. Learning to program is good, yes, but to be honest, what goal are you trying to achieve? The article suggests that the goal might be to allow people to enter the job market more quickly. The fact is that "programming" in and of itself is just grunt work. Forcing…

As for what goal you're trying to accomplish - I think it would be worthwhile just to see what sort of software people start writing when the expected level of programming knowledge starts increasing. With text editors, for instance, we already know there is a spectrum of possible solutions, some of which are easy to learn but not very productive, and some of which take a long time to learn but are very efficient (Emacs). What happens when millions more people have enough knowledge to use Emacs effectively? Or what would happen to spreadsheets if most people knew enough to make their own one-off calculating programs? I don't think they'd go away, but they might look different. I will be very interested to see where this goes.

But yes, you're certainly right that problem solving is the most important thing to teach. I think your idea of a comprehensive problem-solving approach is interesting - it sounds like you want to make that a theme across several classes. One of them could be programming, but perhaps other sorts of engineering could use it too.

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#67

Post by professorTuring » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:29 PM UTC

No. It doesn't make sense at all.

It comes to me that teaching code in high school is a bad idea. It is a good idea to teach how to solve mathematical problems with a programming language. Just as a mathematical tool.

It's curious how teaching "how to code" is going to greatly devalue the "coding-ability". Here, in Spain, coding is highly undervalue mainly because a lot of mathematician and physics and graduated in politics ( I mean, everybody) learned "how to program" in a one month course. So enterprises tend to think "anyone can code" instead of "I should hire professionals".

And it's true. Those people know how to solve problems with a computer language, but they DON'T produce good software solutions (just generalizing) and you end up having a big ball of mud. This shouldn't be a problem if enterprises would have realized about software quality and maintenance. But they haven't.

The consequence of all this it's clear. Very low salaries and an undervalued profession.

--- Aren't you agree with me? Just have a look to the web. Most of non CMS web pages full of bells and whistles are clearly a mess. In fact, I really believe that most of web-related technology is a big ball of mud (HTML+php+javascript+css+json+...) because the main users/creators are not computer scientists. Yes, these technologies are a solution but I don't believe they're a good solution. (I'm not saying I could make it better, I'm just talking about the mess involving building a web page against building computer software).

---

Nevertheless, don't take me wrong. It's great to bring programming closer to the people. It's great to have a lot of people improving, creating, developing and designing. But people won't never understand that coding is different than building software.

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#68

Post by majelix » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:56 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #50

jlgreco wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to teach computer science by rolling it into mathematics curriculum, I would be all for that. Throw in some basic discrete and you would have yourself a very solid class that could be reasonably taught by teachers you can already find in school districts. Make it one of the elective mathematics, like it should be. Required coding courses though? That would be like a required shop class. I wouldn't suppo…

> it would almost certainly poison the minds of the people who have no interest in it ...what exactly do you mean by "poison the minds"? I think "rolling it into mathematics curriculum" is the best way to make a large portion of students averse to it! In my country, we had a pretty advanced chunk of probability and statistics rolled into the math curriculum - it was a disaster, even the teachers tried to skip it beca…

>> it would almost certainly poison the minds of the people who have no interest in it

> ...what exactly do you mean by "poison the minds"?

Not the OP, but I think he's afraid that the level of education provided for coding will be like the level of education currently provided for english or math. How many people do you know who claim to hate classical literature? Many of those are probably because they were forced to churn through and regurgitate about grommets instead of just enjoying a book. How many people claim to hate proofs because they were forced to write down "a straight line is straight" a million times in basic geometry?

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#69

Post by taylonr » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 1:58 PM UTC

I get nervous every time the federal gov't tries to mandate things in school. It always seems like something from either the 50 facts & fallacies of software development and/or the mythical man month. It's as if they realize things are screwed up so they try to slap some tape on the side and hope that fixes it.

Re: Obama endorses required high school coding classes

#70

Post by majelix » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 2:03 PM UTC

DeepDuh wrote: post #57

spc476 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, one must know how a car works in order to drive? I'm really torn on this topic. I'm a programmer, and I can understand how understanding how a computer works can be useful. And if I were to be extreme, I would demand that every programmer should not only learn assembly, but write one non-trival program in it. I mean, it's not hard. Tedious, yes, but not hard. But I'm realistic enough to know that not everyone wil…

Would we require people to know the basics about car mechanics if 90% if out jobs were depending on driving a car and if people had about 50 of them on average? I think yes, Sir.

Unless the work from rate is vastly higher or mass transportation vastly better where you are than me, 90% of jobs requiring a car is a huge understatement. People own several cars over their lifetime and it's one of the largest purchases they will ever make. Mistakes in a car are far more dangerous and expensive than mistakes with a computer.

You know, maybe bringing back driver's ed wouldn't be a terrible idea after all.