What makes programming so special that we should shield people without aptitude from learning it?
Many have no aptitude for language – we still require english classes. Many have no passion for the sciences – we still require studying chemistry and biology. Some could care less about history – but every year of high school typically includes a history class scoped to one period or region.
So why should programming be different? Why should we shield people from learning a subject which has ubiquity equal to language or mathematics, and infinitely more lucrative application? Why should we accept a substantial chunk of our population being illiterate on a discipline whose misunderstanding can have terrible consequences for both individuals and society at large?
Understanding how a computer works, in a world dominated more and more by technology, places you at great advantage. Ignorance of the same leaves you at the mercy of those who are technically proficient and, more and more, limits your lifetime income potential.
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?
We had a required "computer skills" class at my high school (over a decade ago) that was, by all measures of the term, useless. Any of my friends who were proficient enough to merely browse the web at the time were already too advanced to learn anything from it. Mind, it was also taught by someone laughably inept. And yet, there we have it, a 'required' computer course.
These days, toddlers use iPads. The web is beyond pervasive. I have no idea what my old high school is doing, but I can't imagine it's changed much.
Most kids will never use this skill, but then that's what all teenagers say. Some will! By no means will they be writing iOS apps. Or talking efficiency or language design any of what the naysaying comments suggest. If we can teach that computers are not 'magic' and help them understand some of the bare minimums of control flow, logic, and so on (however that may be achieved; Scratch-like, JS, whathaveyou) -- that computers only do what you tell them -- it'll make a dent in society.
Pre-Algebra
Algebra
Trig
Geometry
Algebra 2
Pre-Calc
Calc
And sciences were similar (and all elective):
Chemistry
Biology
Physics
etc...
I really don't get why "computer skills" should be conflated with learning how to program completely. The world is very large and needed skill-sets change very fast. I guess that we should, since it is the current trend, force students to learn about handling large amounts of data and working through statistics and probability courses as well?
Speaking as someone who has been on both sides, you do not fully understand how a computer works until you understand how to write code for it in some form. Do they need to know how to write a compiler? Absolutely not. But knowing how to write a script with conditional outcomes is probably a worthwhile exercise.
> The world is very large and needed skill-sets change very fast.
If you believe that computing is going to go away in the next 30 years, that would be a fair point. But we both know that computers are creeping further and further into everyday life. Having a basic grasp on how to direct and control them is an obvious advantage.
Your litany of courses does nothing to counter the reality that we are already forcing kids to learn certain subjects. What about computing makes it less valid than history, science or mathematics as a required field of study? We can say with certainty that students are more likely to encounter a computer than they are to encounter Henry VIII, Schrodinger's Cat, or a sperm whale.
Basic probability and an understanding, at least intuitive, of statistics should be thought to everybody - it's gonna help you even if you end up writing poetry or painting for a living, trust me! Imho this is more important that teaching coding, as it's quite easy to for anyone to pick up a well written programming tutorial, but much harder for an artistically oriented person to gain an intuitive understanding of probability - you need a good teacher for this, a teacher that when he sees you can't grasp the formula has the idea to bring some dice and poker cards to class and teach it to you this way!
Well I really don't get why "math skills" should be conflated with learning how to program completely. Why don't we just teach kids how to use a calculator?
I didn't know it was a career option, an academic discipline, anything. Computers were just the thing this boring woman taught us to do spreadsheets on.
At home my old C64 was something that could be programmed, sure, but I was under the impression that was basically a toy. If I hadn't had a parent who were at least interested in this stuff I would have been completely unaware.
In fact worse than that, the boring 'computer proficiency' type courses actually put me off investigating anything to do with this area. Beyond that, with the proliferation of consumption devices, the actual machine and code part of the computer is more hidden than ever before.
Computers run more and more of everything, we owe it to our kids to at least tell them that they can be programmed, and give every kid at least a small intro into how to do it.
My biggest issue is that most people for mandatory programming often believe that it will make kids "programmers" and will make them understand computers. For starters, I know a load of working programmers that don't really understand computers that well, and programming for an hour or two a week for a few months isn't going to make you a programmer, no more than me cooking dinner every night makes me a chef, or fixing a leaky pipe makes me a plumber.
I do think that programming should be taught in schools, as people need to learn the production side of the tools that society relies on so much. I also think that schools could go much further in teaching kids rudimentary skills for life as well, like fixing things around the house, basic car maintenance and basic money skills. In my mind programming is no more important than any of these skills, and if programming is to be taught in schools then so should these skills.
Grant it, we all have our weaknesses (I have terrible rote-style memory so I did terrible in History), but I don't think that purposefully pushing kids into classes were there is a chance over 50% can't get a grip on it is a good idea. As an elective course, it is great, but should be no more mandatory than a foreign language or requiring people to master pre-calculus before graduating. I mean, with programming being so mathematical, why would you mandate students to program when so many struggle to get past algebra in high school?
I would be extremely sceptical of the claim that 50% of people cannot learn programming as much as I would be sceptical of the claim that the same number of people would be incapable of learning written english or basic algebra. This is assuming that there is good quality instruction available (this is of course the hard part in reality).
Bear in mind we are probably talking about very simple stuff here like for loops , simple algorithms like bubblesort and maybe some javascript animations or whatever.
How to architect large OO systems, how to handle concurrency etc are probably not topics that need to be covered here at all. Students who want to study to be professional programmers will likely do extracurricular learning or take further courses.
I taught myself to do simple program at ~age 10 and please believe me when I say that I was in no way a gifted child. Not only this but I successfully taught some of my friends how to program and they didn't seem to struggle too much.
Programming can also bring new dimensions to other classes, for example it helped me check answers in math, made algebra much more intuitive and I even submitted a text adventure in place of a linear story in a creative writing class.
So I argue that programming courses may actually be a good way to boost the really important stuff - literacy and mathematics. (I think everyone here would agree that literacy is an important part of being a good developer.) It's a real, practical, exciting application of these more abstract ideas.
The president suggested that with the high interest in digital technology among
young people it makes sense to teach skills like programming and graphic design
in high school so that students can go on to pursue a career, with or without a
four-year college degree.
EDIT: I'm wrong. The very first line of the article:
President Obama says he wouldn't mind seeing a curriculum requirement for
American high school students to learn a programming language.
Absolutely, and there's a big difference between "endorses" as in a quick mention and "endorses" as in pushing for it with all his political power - however, just because it's him mentioning it rather than him trying to make it happen it doesn't change the fact that he did endorse it, as the title claims, and that for him to do that is still very relevant.
I wouldn't expect this to happen given the general trend away from anything resembling vocational training and the lack of skills to teach the class.
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.
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 proficiency in by the time they leave high school.
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.
Forcing people without an aptitude or interest to take some sort of "one size fits all" coding course is going to perpetuate myths and misconceptions about the industry. It is better for students to know that they don't know what programming is like than for them to think they know, and think it is awful.
You'll note students have a modest amount of choice. Sometimes they must take a specific course like Financial Literacy, other times they get to pick from a set, e.g. the "science core -- 2 different quadrants" requirement. That one means you do any two year-long classes in physics, chemistry, biology, or...earth sciences I think? As you might guess, most students did the easiest ones: earth sciences and biology. Physics was the least popular one and class sizes were usually small. (By the time I left however an energetic young teacher had taken over and was aggressively getting students interested.)
Anyway, the most important thing I want to highlight is the 5.5 credits of electives. That's what I suggest gets "cut"--i.e., make it 4.5 credits of electives, and require a 1 credit (== year-long course) in programming. For the students who may have already wanted to take such a class anyway (if they're lucky enough to be at a school that offers it), nothing is really "cut" for them. For other students, what gets "cut" is still up to them--as it always has been by nature of electives: students decide "I don't want to take this offered course and will instead take that one." Cutting an elective gives them slightly less choice, but it's a worthwhile trade-off I think.
My one question about a proposed mandate from Congress on a programming class: can we retroactively apply it to all federal and state government employees?
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...
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....
Geez.
If they're really producing stuff, there's a good chance it involves a bit of programming (and wasn't HN discussing this a few days ago?).
In North Korea, they call this Juche. They say it works great, but I think they might be twisting the facts a bit.
We all had to take one semester of home economics and shop. Those classes weren't simply fluff even if we thought they were. They were also exposing us to useful life skills that could translate into jobs if we found the classes interesting. While sewing and cooking tend to be low wage work, they also exposed us to drafting, CAD, CNC milling machines, and other job skills that may have seemed more useful before China took those jobs away. We all had to take these classes even if we were destined to become programmers.
Far more valuable than high school classes though would be adding computer clubs and contests at younger ages. Why would we wait until college ACM competition to make programming a rewarding skill? Computer skills are more important than chess or junior high football.
This is a good thing. Do your kids a favor, teach them how to code.
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.
Yes -- be that as it may, let's remember that mathematics and arithmetic are two different things. Arithmetic is useful even though we now have calculators everywhere, but understanding math is much more important -- and it isn't about adding columns of figures or figuring a tip in one's head.
It was poorly taught. Half of the class couldn't even figure out loops, they were literally scared of them coming out. They absolutely hated it.
I chose to continue studying this subject at sixth form (basically the local equivalent of high school) and even though we were now taught by engineers and people with doctorates, they were horrible. They just spoon fed us, giving us programs to study by heart. They had no idea of code redundancy, modularity or readability.
These were for students who chose to study the subjects. What the situation would be like if these courses were compulsory.
In highschool i took my first formal programming course, and despite a very good teacher, the majority of my classmates struggled. I can say i saw similar results in my early college programming.
I love the idea of introducing more people to programming, but from my experience, this would be setting a majority of students up for struggles and failures. The few who would succeed will instead be distracted by the rest.
Tools become better, many people will never need to code to become productive. One tool that allows people to do fancy stuff without coding is Excel. In fact the whole MS Office suite has means to create automatizations that would take a coder a long time to realize from scratch.
On the other hand I would be in favour of mandatory HTML classes. It's a purely descriptive language, used in many fields. (But who knows, that skill might as well become obsolete when MS releases Frontpage 2020 RT.)
These days we're seeing a similar pattern with mobile development: "learn to program for the iphone! Make lots of money!" and to a lesser extent general computer programming.
The cynical part of me believes it's another sign of a bubble, but it may just be circumstance.
Ukrainian (and post-Soviet) education system is somewhat different from US, as students can leave high school after their sophomore year, if their future plans involve going to a vocational school, community college or just straight to work. Only those who plan to enter college stay for the last two years.
Sounds like a bit of a buzz kill already.
The fact is that "programming" in and of itself is just grunt work. Forcing an entire generation to learn how to put strings together to do stuff won't help any of them when they go to a job interview and see a hundred other interviewees with the exact same proficiency for copying snippets from websites.
Problem solving is the much more important thing here, and that is already focused on in high school (remember word problems?). Programming allows students to explore problem solving more interactively, yes, but requiring schools to teach programming won't help in the long run any more than emphasizing a more comprehensive and intuitive approach to solving problems - I'm sure there'll be enough of those by the time these guys graduate to last forever. :)
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.
It is the most concrete impediment to responsive education I've seen in my lifetime.
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