Google Blogger: Vietnamese HS Students Excelling At CS 291
An anonymous reader writes "A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA (and his blog), students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned U.S. school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim goes to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of U.S. school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's Wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools."
Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:2)
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Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Interesting)
High school is lax because we don't have tiered curricula like other countries. The slackers staying in school because they'd be arrested otherwise are sitting next to the kids planning on going for PhDs. We need tiered programs so that those pursuing further education aren't slowed down by the kids who are just looking to finish and go off into the work force.
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, I'm 44 so it was a while ago I was in HS. I recall there were three tracks when I went: vocational (shop, electricity, etc.,easy math, easy English, basic science, etc.), business (typing and whatever else you might study if your goal was to be a receptionist -- easy classes, essentially shop for girls (we were more sexist then)), or college track (various math classes, literature, foreign language, psychology, etc.).
Now, granting that schools can be different, and maybe not all schools in the 80s did this, I would be really surprised if this has all gone away. I chose to not have kids so I wouldn't know from personal experience, but I could have sworn I heard someone bragging about how well their sprog did in AP something or other recently. The existence of an AP curriculum suggests to me that students are still tiered.
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the No Child Left Behind push towards standardized testing pretty much made that go away. That and budget cuts with art and shop being trimmed way down or tossed out all together in many places.
Nickle B (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, it's all gone away. There's AP classes for early college credit, honors classes for people who work a little harder, normal classes for everyone, and a couple of one-on-one type classes for people with learning disabilities.
My high school used to have shop, sewing, cooking, programming, electronics, various art classes, etc..., and a partnership with a couple local business (consider this a vocational program with a low population limit). Slowly they've almost all gone away due to budget cuts. You c
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And then some of us went multi-track. I was in all the advanced math/science courses (e.g. Calc. for college credit)
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Informative)
No psychology, no philosophy, no non-latin foreign languages, no math beyond pre-calculus (which was what we had labeled as AP Calculus), and even chemistry was missing from the curriculum. Granted, it's a school in a poor rural area, but there are a lot of poor rural areas in the US.
Words can't express how far behind I felt when I finally hit university, despite graduating at the top of my class in HS with the most difficult curriculum I was able to piece together from the meager offerings.
Education is heavily touted during election season, but unfortunately it's the first thing sent to the chopping block when budgets are tight.
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I graduated just a few years before you, from a pretty decent public school [wikipedia.org], and even we did not have access to a number of the courses you mentioned.
Growing up that close to Silicon Valley, I was fairly sure what type of work I would find myself doing later in life (not to mention being given my first computer, an 80286, before I was even a teenager). I remember Chemistry class fairly well. It was right after lunch my junior year. The class after lunch was when we had 'silent reading' time... usually when
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I'm 2 years younger than you, and had the same experience. However, my sister is another 2 years younger, and actually between me and her, our high school had a major overhaul and indeed got rid of all those differentiated tracks. Under education-school dogma of the early/mid 90's "tracking" is considered to be a four-letter word and widely forbidden. I was just talking about this to my family last night -- my father was completely bewildered by it, but my mother who still works in a junior high school has
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
It would help a lot if we respected blue collar labor more. Your plumber, your carpenter, your steel mill worker, and anyone who knows what the heck he's doing on a factory floor are skilled, valuable workers doing important things that have to be done. We need to stop treating high school like the only valid thing it does is train people for college. We don't have the college capacity, we don't have enough qualified students, and the job force doesn't have the need for as many students as we try to push through to university. Vocational high schools used to be a thing (probably still are some left).
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
blue collar workers turn squiggles on paper into skyscrapers, which is certainly more respectable than the worthless stockbrokers who now work in those skyscrapers
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:4, Funny)
blue collar workers turn squiggles on paper into skyscrapers
So basically, you're saying that architects are like hackers, blueprints are like programs, and blue collars are like trusty, reliable, slightly dull transistors? Well, I think many hackers here *do* have respect for transistor technology, but that's probably not the kind of respect one wishes if one, in fact, *isn't* an uneducated redneck.
The stockbrokers...that would be parasitic capacitances with leak currents?
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It would help a lot if we respected blue collar labor more. Your plumber
I'd be happy respecting them more if I paid them less - plumbers call out fees in the UK are astonishing.
In fact... all your examples of jobs we undervalue seem to be decently paid (save carpentry - that's _all_ imported now). Car mechanics, plumbers, electricians, builders are all complained about at least as much as other services.
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't mean undervalued by pay. I meant undervalued by the education system, which goes hand-in-hand with lack of respect (again that's actual respect as in admiration not money). I suggest that we'd be better off if these sorts of trades were treated as worthwhile goals for a student instead of it being "college or nothing" in high school. College is great for some people. College is a waste of time for others. Not everyone is well suited to it, and we don't need as many college graduates as a percentage of population as we seem to want to educate.
It's mildly ironic that the lack of respect causes fewer people to pursue those careers, which causes scarcity and thus the higher pay you mention.
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You should try calling out a plumber in California. You would be glad to pay what whose plumbers are charging you in the UK (and yes, I do know how much plumbers charge in the UK).
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That seems fair enough, skilled workers, good at their jobs, earning a decent living and getting respect for it. I had assumed that a lot of non-white collar workers in the US were similar, is that not the case?
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Trying to teach skills in a classroom is not going to work. Trying to learn knowledge "on the job" is not going to work.
People learn differently, so this isn't necessarily true. It depends on the individual and how they go about it.
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As an engineer who has done a fair bit of plumbing, carpentry, etc, I'd say that there is a fundamental and critical common ability between the trades and engineering. The ability to conduct a thoughtful analysis and then flip the switch to synthesis to solve a problem makes all the difference in preventing a 30 minute job from turning into a 6 hour job.
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Actually, the main problem I have is all the rote memorization and nonsensical standardized tests, not the lack of tiered curricula.
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
programming might become another minimum wage job with workers being a dime a dozen.
I wouldn't worry about it...that's not the point of teaching programming that early. The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability. Today, if you want specialized software for a specific area that requires other skills, you hire a programmer and train him/her on the domain. In the future, those kinds of specialized software will be written by people with domain training/expertise. But there will always be strictly programming jobs that require additional training beyond that given in high school. Granted, exposing kids to programming at an early age will allow kids who wouldn't otherwise realize that they love it or have a talent at it, but it won't drastically increase the number of programmers. I'm too lazy to find references, but there's been studies that show that less than 25% of the population is capable of enjoying working as a programmer.
So yes, some of the jobs that are currently filled by programmers will go to people who wouldn't otherwise have been able to accomplish them. But there will be so many more jobs that require programming that it will more than even out.
Excelling at CS? (Score:2)
Yes, but, there's this [flickr.com].
Not sure that's actually recoverable.
Laughing at the Vietnamese ? (Score:5, Informative)
You guys can laugh at the Vietnamese
Go ahead, have your laugh now
In Great Britain, they do have "computer classes" in their high schools. But do you know what they teach?
How to use Microsoft Words
How to make a Powerpoint Presentation
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I'm just laughing at their canine... fashion sense. I'm perfectly ok with being out-programmed by them. But my animals are better accoutered [flickr.com]. :)
Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ? (Score:4, Funny)
Did you seriously just admit to owning a cat stroller, while at the same time ridiculing a dog owner for giving their pet a jacket? ...and THEN say your pet is better?
Someone... please, take care of the riff-raff.
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A far cry from let's help kids develop cognition and imagination by learning programming; a developmental tool like how Alan Kay might have wished.
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Microsoft Words?
Developers Developers Developers Developers!
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.... In the future, those kinds of specialized software will be written by people with domain training/expertise
This is such crap. You're just talking about flooding the workforce with coders who can't find jobs.
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.
The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.
ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.
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but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.
[Citation needed]
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Interesting)
[Citation needed]
You need a reference for people having a whole range of different personalities, intelligence, capabilities and personalities?
There are many, many people (indeed the vast majority) who just do not have the excruciatingly logical (and perhaps blinkered) mind that a good programmer requires. Unless there is some major racial difference with the Vienamese (I am prepared to believe there is some) the Google blogger is talking bollocks. Even among engineers: I have worked with other engineers all my life and there are some who simply do not have a coder's mindset. I thought I did (I do some small apps in C as a hobby) until I met some real expert coders. The are not "better" people, they just have that particular capability and were certainly less good than I am in other areas like getting a broken-down machinery going again, my own particular skill.
Many people are no more likely to make good programmers than I am to be a good chat-show host - believe me.
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Mind if I share with you a few insights from AI research ? 1) Nobody is logical, or rational. A rational person would starve in front of the first closed door he finds. Why ? A rational person decides on actions by expected_gain * chance_of_event. Behind the door could be a bear, that would kill you. Sure the chance is tiny, but the cost of dying is -inf ... So no matter the chances involved a rational person would never do anything that might cause his death. And every action can cause death. Now this is the extreme version of this argument, but it applies to everything. Rationality doesn't work. Proof that this isn't so can be mailed, in the form of a prolog program that can deal with any chaotic world, with incomplete information (chaotic in the mathematical sense). Note that AI research worldwide spent about 30 years finding such programs, and none have been found.
I think that shows the limitations of AI research more than anything actually useful or true about the world.
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but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.
[Citation needed]
Here [thedailywtf.com].
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If you think that most jobs are going to require programming, then you're saying that most people are going to be unemployable.
If most jobs will require programming, then computers will be doing that programming. Most people will be unemployed and will have to live lives of leisure with a small element of community service just to keep things relatively sane. Clearly, the computers will have to be owned by the community and not just a few rich oligarchs or else there will be social meltdown.
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Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.
The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.
ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.
So... who said anything about China? TFA is about Vietnam, which has less than a third of the population of the US.
Sigh... Whether he used Vietnam or China as an example is immaterial. If one reads the part of his comment that you conveniently skipped, you will find that he was trying to point out that while the percentage of people that possess the aptitude for coding is probably more or less the same in different populations of modern humans, in areas with high population density there are going to be more talented coders. This is kind of obvious to anybody with a rudimentary grasp of statistical analysis, but people still go "Ooooh.... small Asian country country has lots of coders... what are they doing that we are not? Is there something in the water?". What it really boils down to is population density, quality of education, student motivation and the priorities government and educators set in schools which in Asia is Maths, Physics, CS and other technology related subjects and last but not least whether or not scripture thumping zealots are allowed to dictate what gets taught is schools.
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I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner. The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO. ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.
So... who said anything about China? TFA is about Vietnam, which has less than a third of the population of the US.
Sigh... Whether he used Vietnam or China as an example is immaterial. If one reads the part of his comment that you conveniently skipped, you will find that he was trying to point out that while the percentage of people that possess the aptitude for coding is probably more or less the same in different populations of modern humans, in areas with high population density there are going to be more talented coders. This is kind of obvious to anybody with a rudimentary grasp of statistical analysis, but people still go "Ooooh.... small Asian country country has lots of coders... what are they doing that we are not? Is there something in the water?". What it really boils down to is population density, quality of education, student motivation and the priorities government and educators set in schools which in Asia is Maths, Physics, CS and other technology related subjects and last but not least whether or not scripture thumping zealots are allowed to dictate what gets taught is schools.
I read his entire comment. If Vietnam has more high school students who have some knowledge of CS than the US, then it follows that there is a difference in educational policy that is the cause. If China has more than the US, as in his post, then population differences could explain that. The country used in his example is very much material, as a country with less population than us, but more programmers would completely invalidate said example. (If TFA is accurate, of which I cannot be certain.)
However, I
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Education should be the primary focus of our government spending. Doing so will have more long term benefits for us as a nation than any other expenditures.
This is a nice sound bite, but not really true. We picked the low-hanging fruit of education a long time ago. Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years. It's almost certain that we spend too much on education, not too little, but because people who make government policy are the types who do well in school and can't imagine any other way of being, we keep pushing people to go to more and more of it even when it makes no s
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we have not seen significant increases in test scores
Who cares? I firmly believe that rote memorization and teaching to these nonsensical tests that only test for rote memorization are major problems to begin with. I really couldn't care less about these test scores.
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Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years.
Who could imagine a socialist monopoly would not be able to efficiently deliver the demanded services?
I'm not sure if we are spending too much or too little on education, but I am certain that we are keeping an efficient market in delivering education from forming.
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A person who earns $40k a year (a low base for skilled labor) will give roughly $10k a year in taxes...that's a net gain for the government
Actually someone earning $40k is in the middle quintile of incomes, and will generally receive $15k per year in transfer income [taxfoundation.org] from the government, so actually they are a net loss for the government.
They might provide a net gain for the private economy of course (or they would likely not have a job).
Most "net gain" for the government comes from upper quintile income ind
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However, I can be certain that the educational system in the US needs a serious overhaul.
I believe the US is far from alone there.
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That's bullshit. It does take a minimal amount of intelligence to do useful coding, but I'm willing to bet that the requirement on that is less than 100 IQ. What programming requires is experience and interest, just like anything else.
Agreed with. You'll probably need some seed of basic problem solving, but that can be expanded greatly by learning stuff.
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I would agree that the future will have more jobs that require computer use but I don't believe your statement that "nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability" so to speak. It seems unlikely. Computer use != programming which I assume you know and what makes your statement so bizarre.
Re:Not blocking, just ignoring (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.
One of the silliest statements I have seen here for some time.
In the early days of computers it was assumed that you got one to write programs on it. Many people said they would never want a computer because they would never want to write programs. Then games and apps came along, Progressively since then, programming became more and more the province of the specialist.
We have even reached the point where people do not even expect toi have to use a keyboard, let alone type code, and soon it will be just voice control.
Your statement is like someone in 1900 saying that soon everyone will need to build a car for themselves.
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Well, not so much as require programming ability as much as having people who treat computers as more than magical black boxes.
Basically, your capacity to learn, use and troubleshoot stuff (software, hardware, machinery, whatever) is increased dramatically when you have a mental model of how that stuff operates that best approximates how it actually works.
Heck, if the onl
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I rather like having a rare and mysterious skill set that guarantees me high marketability and a respectable salary.
Learn COBOL.
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senior kernel dev
so you're an old fart who worked in a corn field?
HTML image tag? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does an HTML image tag have to do with computer science or being a good software engineer?
Heck, I've been working as a professional software developer in the semiconductor industry for 13 years, can sling C, Matlab and various assembly languages all day long, and think I have a pretty good theoretical grounding, but I'm not terribly familiar with HTML or Java or PHP or whatever the cool kids are using these days (now get off my lawn). I mean, good for them and all, but it seems like a rather hokey standard to judge students by.
Re:HTML image tag? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the the HTML reference comes from several links deep, not specifically, but topically:
http://blog.carolynworks.com/?p=572 [carolynworks.com]
Which was summarized in the article like this:
http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/ [fraser.name]
So essentially he's saying that US CS curriculum is so bad, students can't even do html, which actually isn't programming anyway, it's just a kind of text formatting.
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Which is funny, considering how people aren't willing to pay programmers the salary market scarcity demands. I expect next they will be complaining that there no people who could be programmers accepting a teacher's salary instead.
well IT is not CS and not all IT work is programmi (Score:2)
well IT is not CS and not all IT work is programming or needs the full CS load of theory.
Google Interview Process (Score:3)
If that blog post is an example of what gets past Google's interview process, then I am not at all surprised that 11th grade high school students could also get past it.
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I've gone through Google interviews before. Their questions are rather poor for identifying any true creativity or ability to learn new things, basically just testing with CS brain teasers and annoying algorithms. eBay was even worse - their Java architect asked moronic things like "name 15 Java keywords as fast as you can" and their C++ architect intentionally focused on way-too low level concepts like how compilers constructed vtables (which having worked on compilers I knew, but given his attitude of w
Not Blocking Per Se (Score:5, Interesting)
What's happened is that the national standard for computing education in this country (which have been adopted by most states) are set by a board of specialists who all specialize in the use of computers in education. They don't specialize in computer science. There are no computer scientists on the board at all. As such, they recommend that teachers teach the sort of skills which make the computer useful in reinforcing learning in other subjects because that's what they specialize in. So, for example, they might recommend that students learn how to use spreadsheets in middle school because it helps them in analyzing experimental data in middle school science. Or they might recommend that students learn how to browse the web because it helps them practice reading and study skills. But they don't recommend learning programming because it is outside of their specialty and they likely don't understand how programming can be used to reinforce learning in other subjects (which I would argue that it can be used very effectively to do so for many subjects, especially math and science).
If we want to change this, we need to get state level boards of education to adopt different standards. That's how change will happen.
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If we want to change this, we need to get state level boards of education to adopt different standards. That's how change will happen.
Except that many of the state Boards of Education are grappling with such esoteric topics as the validity of evolution or the value of pi.
We're doomed.
Re:Not Blocking Per Se (Score:4, Insightful)
How many skilled programmers are willing to work in schools for the pay that is offered? It's a prime example of if we want kids to have access to knowledge in their schooling, then we need to attract teachers who can impart that knowledge.
Unfortunately in the first world there seems to be a trend to offer as little as possible for education, figuring I suppose that if the next generation is uneducated they will be cheaper to employ.
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Being a skilled programmer doesn't necessarily mean being a skilled teacher, especially when it comes to the basics of programming. It can actually be quite difficult for someone to teach to others the things which come easiest to them. However, your overall point that we don't have a surplus of skilled computer science educators is true. But even without that, forcing at least a little basic computer programming on kids, even with unskilled teachers, is a lot better than letting them do without. I'm pr
stay in school and get the masters / phd in CS tha (Score:2)
stay in school and get the masters / phd in CS that will put you on the skilled teacher track but then your being a skilled programmer will be more booked based and less real world based.
Re:Not Blocking Per Se (Score:5, Interesting)
Figuring I suppose that if the next generation is uneducated they will be cheaper to employ.
Assuming a giant conspiracy is rarely the correct answer.
I suspect that it's simply a side effect of a society's path towards modernisation.
First, lets go back to the fundamental problem: I, as a professional programmer with a CS degree, would make 3-5x more income doing work in the industry than I would as a teacher. This isn't even skipping the side-benefits of a teaching career such as long holidays, I get more free time as a consultant or contractor than I would as a teacher and still make truckloads more money. This is typical around the western world, and not just in computer science, but many other areas as well.
It wasn't always so! Not so long ago, roughly around the time my grandparents were teaching classes, they were in a "respected profession" that made them one of the best incomes in their home town.
So what changed? Well, progress did. Essentially, the problem is that most other jobs became more productive, often at a staggering rate. A machinist today can make more widgets with better quality than he could a hundred years ago because of automation and better tools. A factory makes more products. A manager managing workers oversees more productivity. A programmer can work on computers millions of times faster than the first computers, using abstract high-level languages that are vastly more productive to use than assembler was.
All of this has translated into increased income (due to increased productivity) for just about everyone, except teachers, because education has remained largely stagnant in terms of productivity for centuries now. Class sizes are still "optimal" at roughly 30 students per teacher. There is no way to teach certain material to average students before they're old enough, so the process can't be sped up either. The kids get one year older in exactly one year, like they always have! No new technologies have come about either to enable a typical high-school teacher to effectively teach even 300 students, let alone thousands.
Of course, that's not entirely true: new technologies for teaching more efficiently have come about, they just don't look anything at all like a typical classroom, because that has insurmountable scalability problems. Instead, things like the Khan Academy, wiki text books, Wikipedia itself, and the like are slowly starting to make progress towards more efficient and scalable education.
However, none of that translates to increased teacher pay, which is not unusual, because even though it looks like an intellectual profession, in terms of productivity it behaves a lot more like manual labour. A good teacher can teach better, but not more. This is the problem, not some giant conspiracy. The market prices manual labour with low wages, because automation is more efficient and produces more value.
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Outsource This! (Score:3)
They know they are going to get all the outsourced jobs from the US. A US student, on the other hand, has to find something not so easily outsourcable.
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eventually it will be the other way around; americans will be answering phones in call centers and manufacturing shoes for asians.
The US does other things, though (Score:4, Insightful)
Not defending the US education's system's oversight in this area, but I bet if Google interviewed some kids at a US engineering high school, they'd have better results.
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Yeah, we used to teach our kids LOGO and BASIC back in the 80s and early 90s. Now we teach them MS Word, Powerpoint, and Internet Explorer and how to upload videos to YouTube (which is "learning multimedia" in much that same way that the other things are "learning computer science"). We used to do those things. I learned LOGO and BASIC in my elementary school in the early 80s. But you don't find them done any more.
One data point... (Score:5, Informative)
...does not prove anything.
he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag
OK, repeat after me: Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages. It is about the methodology and theory of developing programs, applications, and computational systems. To tell you the truth, I don't cover HTML in my computer science curriculum (and yes, Texas has a full-blown CS curriculum), mainly because CS isn't web development.
Re:One data point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me a cynic, but I don't think this story is what it seems to be.
It wasn't more than a couple weeks ago that I read another Microsoft PR piece attempting to influence Congress into increasing the number of H1Bs they can use. For some reason this new story immediately made me think "You know, if Google was going to try getting more H1Bs, this is pretty much how I'd expect them to go about it."
Google's just really ham-handed and ineffective when it comes to attempting to influence public opinion - witness Brin's bizarre "cell phones are emasculating" statement.
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he claimed that students at Galileo Academy, who had completed a web page authoring subject, had difficulty with the HTML image tag
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He also said that they don't understand loops and conditionals. I think that the author is pretty clear that web development isn't CS, based on several of the other articles he linked to (like, this one [carolynworks.com]). But students who have a solid understanding of programming and are used to consulting reference material for how particular commands or functions work would be highly unlikely to be stymied by IMG tags if they were to try to create some. It's not exactly a complex concept. People who have trouble with
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you'd probably still would understand the img tag in 10 seconds, no?
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That's software engineering.
Computer science is another thing entirely.
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"Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages."
They are not identical. But programming is a necessary requirement for computer science -- in the same way that the alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar are necessary requirements for literature.
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Old Aussie joke (Score:3, Funny)
There is cruft to be sure (Score:4, Insightful)
My kid spends way too much time imo learning cursive. They make her do a lot of her work in both cursive and print which seems like a waste of time when the number of hours spent in class keep shrinking. They should be learning to type and print; forget about cursive.
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What else would you like a 6-year-old to be taught? Numerical analysis?
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Kids can't even speak English correctly, and you want them to half-learn a bunch of useless languages instead of doing something that is fundamentally useful like learning to write with a pen?
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Knowing several human languages (as well as programming languages) is, IMHO, an essential skill set.
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Make it part of their art class. Seriously, kids don't learn much of anything in their art classes--they just experiment with different media and are encouraged to 'be creative'. At least teach them cursive and calligraphy during that time and free up class time for other subjects.
fake, as always (Score:5, Informative)
Vietnamese here, I have read that article a few days ago in my language. It is very likely that the school selected the best students in the whole school, put them in one 'class' for the test. It's commonly accepted here to do anything so you won't "lose face" and appear better than you really are. We have a proverb for that, "Show the beauty, hide the ugly".
Google's H1B visa lobbying (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be clever for the pro-H1B visa lobbyists at Google to plant news stories about how gifted foreign workers are?
If the argument is "US ed bad, Foreign ed good" and therefore "US workers bad, Foreign workers good" necessitates liberalizing H1B visas, well it just writes itself.
Not saying that /. is just a plant for Google PR hacks or nothing. Ok, maybe I am.
The U.S. teaches kids what the markets will handle (Score:2)
U.S. labor is expensive, so teaching every kid here programming at young ages will do very little for their job prospects (companies will still prefer H1-B's). It's one thing to talk about how our education system is falling behind, etc, etc, and another thing entirely for the country -- and the companies within it -- to actually hire American workers when they can get them cheaper overseas. If not outsource entirely.
This whole thing is disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole thing is disingenuous.
That might have been acceptable to present as an interview question (before it was disclosed), but those kids would not have passed the interview process on a single question, nor would they have even passed the single session interview which used that question, if they took 45+ minutes to arrive at it.
An interview session typically lasts 45 minutes in total, and the point of presenting the problem is to gauge the persons problem solving ability, and their ability to think in terms of their ability to apply CS tools to solve the problem optimally. Taking the full 45 minutes for a single solution would not cut it, even if they ended up with the optimal solution. If they knew the question because someone had leaked it to a jobs board, then immediately solved it optimally, then the immediate response of the interviewer should be to vary the premise to make it a related but slightly different problem. If they didn't solve it optimally, and the interviewer had them iterate on their solution to optimize it, that's the best possible outcome, as far as an interviewer is concerned, as it speaks to the persons thought processes and problem solving capability.
They also would not have passed the educational bar. There are a lot of self-taught programmers who are brilliant at it, but who can not work on teams because they lack the common terminology for algorithms and so on. So they are able to solve a problem in isolation, but they are unable to communicate this information to their peers, and neither can they document it in such a way that a future engineer can pick up where they left off when changing requirements force an incremental update to the design. Without that critical communication, it's impossible to make minimum necessary changes to accomplish a goal, while remaining cognizant of the side effects. So there is typically a degree requirement, and from the fact that you have a degree, you are expected to know things like "big O" notation, and a set of 20-30 algorithms by name so that you recognize them when they are used in code you are later asked to maintain.
It's great that he bought them a teacher for a year by pulling $1,200 out of his personal bank account, but this emphasis recently on Slashdot of trying to get everyone to be a programmer in elementary school is misguided and misses the fundamental point that you can not narrowly focus an early education and expect to have people come out of it with the ability to retrain in other careers should their career become obsolete.
Ethnicity breakdown of Galileo Academy (Score:2)
Wow... I can't believe the ethnicity breakdown listed for that school... 74% of students are Asian, 12% Latino and only 3.4% Caucasian!
And from the Wikipedia article... "Math scores remain one of Galileo's best academic strengths"... Lol.
How much of this HS is teach the test??? (Score:2)
How much of this HS is teach the test???
What the point of being able to pass the test but not really knowing about day to day work. As the test is more of a high level over view with questions that most programmers who have been working for years may not be able to pass as they don't think much about what that test covers.
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Algorithm (Score:2)
So, the programming problem posed in the article is:
"Given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls, count the number of enclosed areas, and measure the size of the largest one."
Who wants to take a stab at an algorithm for that?
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Every religion is a tool invented by people. Tools can be used for good or for evil. Look at the historical record and you wll find examples of that with every belief system invented by man.
No religion should be taught in school. In my opinion, no religion should be taught to any child. When they turn 18 and have an understanding of reason and logic, then they can choose to learn about religion and choose to just "believe" something if they want. Indoctrination of children into a belief system when they are
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDMOxjHIt0U [youtube.com]
Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who knows anything about abrogation knows that Islam is an evil ideology, racist and certainly not a religion of peace.
As a non-Muslim, completely non religious person that has recently read the Bible, the Quran, and the Chumash, I feel like this statement is incredibly bigoted. All of your follow up statements only cement my feelings about your bigotry.
The only way you can state this without being bigoted is if you also state that every organized religion is an evil ideology rooted in racism, and not respectful of peace. No religion should be taught in public schools (save for topical interest/history classes) and I have no idea why you brought this into an article discussion regarding CS education. You could have simply stated that some schools are misappropriating their funds/energy on various other types of programs, when there money/energy would be better spent with programs like Computer Science.
To counter your bigotry, I posit that in order to protect its survival and serve its own self interests, every organized religion is constantly waging a war for your "soul," also known as your money/goods/services/time. This is done in many ways with many tactics or justifications, but the end goal of every major world religion is for one religion to reign supreme - be it the Yahweh/Allah schools of thought or some other totally cool god/gods I've never heard of. Faith does not co-exist with other organized faiths, as every faith is right and no faith uses the scientific method to show how much more right said faith might be. How is the Muslim ideology that much different than that of the Jewish and Christian faiths when all three schools of thought believe in the exact same mythical character that governs the universe?
Maybe, instead of more Computer Science education for kids and teens around the globe, we should just have more education focused in logic.
This should help create better theory around computational processes and design anyways, and would prevent entire internet posts from being written - like the one I am responding to right now..
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i have real desire to be a porn star. doesn't mean i would make a good one.
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Yes, it's all fun, games, and high pay until you get beheaded in the Algerian desert, blown up in the gulf of Mexico, or jail time when you're used as a scapegoat for a superior's dodging of H&S standards to get things done on the cheap.
FWIW, you can easily earn the same amount from a CS degree after a few years, and without the risk of injury/loss of life/prison to boot.