Microsoft, Facebook Declare European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too 213
theodp writes: Having declared U.S. kids clueless about coding, Facebook and Microsoft are now turning their attention to Europe's young 'uns. "As stewards of Europe's future generations," begins the Open Letter to the European Union Ministers for Education signed by Facebook and Microsoft, "you will be all too aware that as early as the age of 7, children reach a critical juncture, when they are learning the core life skills of reading, writing and basic maths. However, to flourish in tomorrow's digital economy and society, they should also be learning to code. And many, sadly, are not." Released at the launch of the European Coding Initiative — aka All You Need is Code! (video) — in conjunction with the EU's Code Week, the letter closes, "As experts in our field, we owe it to Europe's youth to help equip them with the skills they will need to succeed — regardless of where life takes them."
Apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
The only competent coders in the world are the ones who will work for $8/hour.
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This is an effort to saturate the market so that'll be the case. Nobody believes everyone needs to know how to code and there's no way any but the most tech savvy 7 year olds are even interested at all. If you stuck me in front of a computer to mimic code someone showed me at 7, I'd have thought "okay, great, when is recess?" No way I'd have been able to grasp a lot of the higher level thinking involved. Now it's a career and a passion, but that particular road didn't even start until I hit my early to
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Still, one could make the case that many more people need to learn how to program (am I an old geezer already if I hate the term "to code" for this particular activity?) than to become professional programmers, just like many more people historically needed to learn how to write than to become professional writers.
I don't think that analogy holds up. Everyone needs to know how to write to be able to get through life in the modern world. Why does the barista who made my coffee this morning, or the woman down the hall in the marketing department need to know how to write a computer program? They don't. Heck, I'm a Sys Admin and I don't know how to program! Sure, I understand the basic concepts of what coding is and can write a shell script or a batch file (I'm getting into Powershell too). But I don't consider th
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Learning to code is learning logic and critical thinking skills, which everyone needs. And it gives an understanding of computers that you can't get from a class where you just memorize terms like client, server, network, etc. And that barista may one day be sitting on a jury judging a technical case.
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Learning to code is learning logic and critical thinking skills, which everyone needs. And it gives an understanding of computers that you can't get from a class where you just memorize terms like client, server, network, etc. And that barista may one day be sitting on a jury judging a technical case.
No, it's not and no it does not. Sorry if this hurts your ego, but the truth is not always painless.
If you had said "Learning to code helps to reinforce some aspects of critical thinking and logic" I would have been able to agree.
If you had said "Demonstrating that English and programming use similar language, such as array, variables, structures, etc.." I may have agreed with that also.
Simple programming is generally along the lines of very simple logic, which anyone with basic math could understand witho
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Learning to code is learning logic and critical thinking skills, which everyone needs. And it gives an understanding of computers that you can't get from a class where you just memorize terms like client, server, network, etc. And that barista may one day be sitting on a jury judging a technical case.
Yeah, but there are other ways to do that than just intro javascript or html classes. What about an introduction to philosophy and logic, you know, the foundation of Western civilization? Or basic science classes, i.e., the scientific method, how to run an experiment, how to test a hypothesis, etc.
Those types of classes would be far more valuable and interesting than any coding class
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Yeah, but there are other ways to do that than just intro javascript or html classes.
Obviously, there's always HtDP, people around which basically made the argument I presented when they set out to design the curriculum.
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I'm sure that in the middle ages the same thinking was used to justify not teaching peasants how to read. The only book that they needed to read was the Bible and you had your priest that could handle that for you. It was only when reading became common that we learned how dumb it was to let other people read for us.
Personally I believe that not everyone needs to know how to code, but they do need to be familiar with how code works, and how they interact with it. How many problems occur because people ar
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Heck, I'm a Sys Admin and I don't know how to program! Sure, I understand the basic concepts of what coding is and can write a shell script or a batch file (I'm getting into Powershell too). But I don't consider that programming.
If you leave computers to one side for a moment and you think about the word "programming", it is very close in meaning to "scheduling", and batch scripting revolves around scheduling. If you think about the Unix model, a lot of early programming was just a matter of manipulating multiple command-line tools. Now if you look inside a book on C (either A Book on C or any other book on C), you'll find that procedural programming is very, very similar to the Unix command line in a lot of ways, except that inste
Re:Apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
And just like you can't simply pump more people into med school to end up with more doctors, you cannot pump more people into computer schools to get more programmers. Programming isn't middle management, you can't simply take any simpleton and expect them to be able to learn how to do it.
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And just like you can't simply pump more people into med school to end up with more doctors, you cannot pump more people into computer schools to get more programmers. Programming isn't middle management, you can't simply take any simpleton and expect them to be able to learn how to do it.
If your assertion is true, then there is something deeply wrong with the programming field. If it takes what is effectively a defective human brain to code, then our programming languages are wrong. Time to rewrite computing then...?
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We live in a world where software is expected to be the kind of crap any simpleton could write.
Once upon a time, Microsoft brought out this product called Visual Basic...
Re:Apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, why not teach them plumbing, cost me a hundred bucks to have a tap fixed the last day. If everyone was a plumber I'm sure I could have gotten it done for ten.
This is nothing less than for-profit corporations attempting to interfere with the education system for their own financial gain.
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My mom used to tell me stories about how I would get into the tool drawer, and start taking apart electronics around the house, wh
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Wait, computer time wasn't recess?
I actually think the ubiquity of computers is the reason CS graduation rates have declined since before the dot com bubble. For the millennials, the magic never wears off because computers were never magical to begin with. And kids don't program for fun as much these days because the distance between what they can write and what they see in AAA video games is astronomical.
When I started programming I thought I was the shit when I made a 3d cube rotate on a TRS-80. Sure, it was simple, but it wasn't like I was used to seeing 3d computer graphics on a home computer. Graphics like that in The Last Starfighter blew my fucking mind.
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Really? I got stuck in front of a computer at about that age (it might have been 8 instead) and learned how to use LOGO to draw pictures and Hypercard to make moderately-interactive "stacks," and I thought it was pretty cool.
Well there's your problem: you had bor
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That is absolute fucking horse shit. The best coders I've ever worked with are American. The Indian coders I've met have create HORRIBLE code.
And I've met and worked with/for/had working for me/had to debug/fix/maintain the code of a horrendous amount of both.
It's politically correct to say Indians are the best coders.
And it makes you feel good because they work for cheap.
But it's horse shit and everyone knows it.
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That is absolute fucking horse shit. The best coders I've ever worked with are American.
Sorry, but that's absolute fucking horse shit. The best coders I've ever worked with are Scottish.
This is probably because I live in Scotland so it's pretty much inevitably true. The same would hold for you. My problem with trusting you as a code dev is that you appear ignorant of statistical effects. The best coders I've worked with understand stats. Sadly most coders don't.
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You say that if we slaughter him about 100k families could be fed?
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What? Who could we sell them to? I wanna cash in before they pop.
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No he's not, he's absolutely right.
Back when I was in university, it was taken for granted that programming would become a non-specialist skill because the biggest difficulty in dev was knowledge transfer. How do you get a software team to understand in months what took the guys doing the job four years of university education and five years of experience? So CS professors all basically agreed that computers would never reach their potential if the programming skills never migrated to the subject matter exp
Is anyone buying this? (Score:5, Informative)
Translation: We need to flood the job market so we can hire cheaper workers. Is anyone actually buying this?
Re:Is anyone buying this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Politicians.
Re: Is anyone buying this? (Score:2)
In Germany this is called FachkrÃftemangel. It is happening here for decades. However, the income of skilled workers (FachkrÃfte) has gone side ways. Therefore either all IT workers love their boss and hate money or they are idiots. It could NEVER ever be the case that there is no shortage.
On a side note: Skilled worker is a completely imprecise term.
There might be some value here (Score:2)
What's with the commenting? (Score:2)
Fucking liars (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course they are saying that. According to these huge multinationals, the only ones who are not clueless are always conveniently the ones from countries who will accept dirt cheap wages. Funny how that works out.
early age influences (Score:5, Interesting)
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In the social sciences, social structure is the patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of the individuals.
Desire: a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.
If you're unable to link those together, then hopefully you're not in any position to decide things for a large number of people. And if you do know how to link those things together, then you should (at least try to) be in a position to decide things for a large number of people. If a large number of people are able to link those things together, then we don't need so many people deciding things for a large number of people.
Is the oposite true? (Score:5, Funny)
As a former European kid, can I declare Microsoft clueless about coding too?
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And:
* User-interface design
* Upgrade migration management
* Customer relations
* Standards compliance
* Packaging design [youtube.com]
* Stage dancing
* Chair care
There is more to running a software company than finding inexpensive docile labor.
They forgot (Score:2, Insightful)
These 7 yr olds need to learn to EAT THEIR BROCCOLI!
Oops, forgot... parents around the world have already been doing that forever.
Consumer based economy. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't exactly nurture a consumer based economy to support your profits, then complain that it's not producing enough builders.
Re:Consumer based economy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but paying your employees anything beyond poverty wages is SOCIALISM!!!!!
Or, you know, it's simply smart business as Henry Ford found out. He made his money back and then some by paying his workers wages higher than he had any necessity to do.
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That's one thing that people often forget in these minimum wage/living wage debates: the employee still has to be productive enough to earn those wages.
And there is no real proof that even a majority of all currently employeed programmers in the US or Europe aren't being productive enough to make their wages that amount to about .0003% of what Zuckerberg is worth. And I dare you to prove he has been "productive" enough to earn the $33 billion dollars he has in paper wealth.
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...That's one thing that people often forget in these minimum wage/living wage debates: the employee still has to be productive enough to earn those wages. ...
No one is forgetting that, Coward, except maybe the corporations writing the paychecks.
Looking at the productivity vs compensation curves for Americans over the last 50 years [epi.org] there has been an enormous increase of average productivity (2.5 times increase) but virtually no corresponding in real average wages, and the real minimum wage has actually declined [wikipedia.org], and corporations like Walmart are making record profits [wikinvest.com] ($127 billion for Walmart this year) so worker productivity is doing very, very well for the co
Why 7 ? (Score:2, Insightful)
When I was 7, computers were something with lights you saw on Star Trek. I didn't start coding until I was in my teens. And this was when coding was hard work. Not like the spoon-fed coding environments you get now.
Yet I manage.
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Total bullshit ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Europe and America ...
From the Christian Alliance for World Dominance: Your young ones need to learn our stuff.
From the Muslim Alliance for World Dominance: Your young ones need to learn our stuff.
From the Fossil Fuel Alliance for World Dominance: Your young ones need to learn our stuff.
From the Science Alliance for World Dominance: Your young ones need to learn our stuff.
From the Welding Alliance for World Dominance: Your young ones need to learn our stuff. ...
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Yes, but this is programming:
foreach $alliance_list[] as $interest {
echo "From the $interest Alliance for World Dominance: Your young ones need to learn our stuff.";
}
Fundamentals (Score:5, Insightful)
What I learned that help me do this, was how to learn. Start teaching that, and you will find they are prepared for whatever comes down the line in the future. Stop making automatons.....
Jim
Re:Fundamentals (Score:5, Insightful)
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What I learned that help me do this, was how to learn. Start teaching that, and you will find they are prepared for whatever comes down the line in the future. Stop making automatons.....
But then they might go learn what they want to learn, and not what big business needs them to learn. Can't have that!
Re:Fundamentals (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed! It was horrendously bad in the 1990s in the Netherlands. I have a friend who was graduating from 'teaching school' then. She sent me emails riddled with spelling errors and crooked sentences. Amazingly she got her degree no problem. Later, in the early 2000s the govenment finally found out that something had to be done and they settled for a mandatory writing and math test for everyone who wanted to teach 4 - 12 year olds. The majority of the people who took those tests failed miserably. Things have improved a lot since then. My friend also improved and I get messages from her with normal Dutch sentences and well-spelled words. She even teaches dyslectic kids how to read and write now.
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Incidentally... (Score:2)
However, my understanding(both in personal experience and from what I've read on the subject) is that actually-good, especially actually-really-scary-good, programmers have to be born and then polished, and that just throwing more practice at the unsuited do
Silicon Valley (Score:2)
As to the premise of the article, I call BS that you need to start coding by age 7 or you'll be behind. Trying to teach most 7 year olds something as abstract as coding won't get you very far. You are better off trying to teach them logic games instead. And honestly, I didn't actually like coding until m
It's so true (Score:3)
My company has been trying to hire the 12 year old and younger set because they are cheap but out of all the ones we've interviewed they can't pass the technical phase of the interview process.
Out of desperation we've been forced to hire CS and EE college grads that learned how to code as undergrads. They're ok. They typically know C, Java, Python, and such but we have still not found a candidate that has 2+ years experience writing device drivers in Scratch.
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Same problem where I work, we're looking for someone with 12+ years experience in Swift.
Ah yes (Score:2)
Learn coding, do work for some huge corporation, slave away, and not actually own anything you produce for the company... very glamorous...
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Coding where? (Score:2)
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The big box stores have been replaced by the Internet, so.... Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc.
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In the late 70's and early 80's in the US, you could go into a big box store and buy a computer with BASIC for under $200. Heck, the Sinclair boxes were under a $100. Which computer fits that description today?
Raspberry Pi. You can get it, plus necessary cables, mouse, keyboard and SDCard for under $100. All you need to bring to the table is a TV.
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In the late 70's and early 80's in the US, you could go into a big box store and buy a computer with BASIC for under $200. Heck, the Sinclair boxes were under a $100. Which computer fits that description today?
Just about any of them. For 200 1980 dollars in equivalent money, you could get a Mac mini and start programming whatever flavor of C they're working on or HTML or Javascript. There are free BASIC emulators that can be had as well as probably a dozen more. Pick up an even cheaper Dell and probably do the same thing. Those computers will be lightyears ahead of the crap that was back then as the users will at least be able to save their work without doubling the cost of their set up. If you wanted to go chea
Sure (Score:2)
And I'll bet the less they earn the better they are...
No surprise. (Score:3)
The same kind of protagonists are performing the same schtick in the US and in Europe.
STEM is called MINT, skill gap is Fachkräftemangel, and H1B is called "blue card" (yes. someone mixed up work permit and permanent residency when looking for a catchy name)
Arguments are the same, debate is the same.
And it becomes slightly absurd when immigration officers at a US border somehow expect every other country but the US to be a 3rd world hole people would be happy to trade in for a McJob in the US of A. They can't even imagine that someone likes their job and their home country and actually WANTS to go home after their visit.
Judging by lots of their products... (Score:2)
Judging by lots of their products and close encounters with their "consultants", I think it is fair to call Micro$oft pretty damn clueless (shoeless)!
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the push for younger coders is to create a user base for microsoft and facebook. microsoft is still thinking everyone can be converted to their crappy software base by letting kids learn how to code for it. when i was coding ircbots i was totally hooked on using windows, because for most of my life gaming i had played on windows computers and nintendo consoles...
i had some pretty cool projects like an ASCII video player (think ASCII art, replaying static frames manually typed out for playback on mirc) it ac
That explains a lot. (Score:2)
People who didn't learn to code by the time they were 7 have never been able to program as adults. It sure is lucky a supply of people taught to code by ancient alien astronauts was supplied to us so we could bootstrap the procedure, because no one in the history of our species has learned new skills past age 7.
Kids don't need to learn to "code" (Score:2)
Kids really don't need to learn to "code". Only trained monkeys working for few bucks/hour "code". Of course, Facebooks and Microsofts need such people too, but that really isn't what we should be teaching to kids.
Have them learn mathematics, abstract and analytical thinking, let them do actual science, experiments, let them tinker (and fail!), expose them to the computers and computer science too. That is much more important.
Whether the little Johnny or Susan can write a program for adding up a few number
Mountains and molehills (Score:2)
Hence it can be learned pretty much at the convenience of the individual in question in a few months, even starting from scratch.
There is no reason to teach "coding" to 7 year-olds. They are too young to fill any vacancies that may exist and by the time they have got to an employable age, obtained a degree (as few employers will touch an IT person without one) the "coding" skills they learned 15 years ago will be almost
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People who are actually good at programming probably already are programming. They find it fun. If they're trying to get more kids into programming, they're probably just getting people who are not entirely interested.
Coding leads to a life of poverty (Score:2)
Have you noticed? (Score:2)
No MBA ever complained about a lack of MBAs in the market. I really wonder why.
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Learning to code (Score:2)
I don't think everyone should have to learn to code. I don't think everyone should learn chemistry either, but schools still do a reasonable job of teaching basic chemistry for kids who choose to pursue it.
The real issue is where I live when it comes to kids taking the option to learn to code is the awful "ICT" curriculum. The problems, in a nutshell are:
1. No environment for the kids to actually learn.
2. The curriculum is mainly nothing to do with ICT, it's really "office skills", in other words how to use
Learning Wall Street (Score:2)
Yet in reality the kids that truly did have a "future", meaning made lots of money, were the ones who studied finance, law or me
Judging by salary and the "supply vs demand" logic (Score:3)
I dare say that we don't lack programmers. But considering the wages of C-Level execs, there must be an incredible shortage of them.
In a nutshell, we need A DAMN LOT more C-Level managers. Push kids into MBA courses. A few decades of graduates might finally get that salary level back to something more in touch with their actual worth.
Huh? What do you mean, that's not what you meant? Care to elaborate?
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So, you are using the fact that C-level executive salaries don't work the way you expect supply and demand to work in the labor market as evidence that we don't lack programmers?
Your expectations are wrong. Salaries aren't set just by supply and demand, for numerous reasons.
And, FWIW, compensation at Microsoft and Facebook is far above the median for US workers anyway.
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Oh? So please enlighten us, which un-capitalistic mechanism sets the price of labour?
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Markets set the price of labor. You simply don't understand how markets work. Decreasing the supply of something doesn't necessarily increase its price, it may simply cause people to substitute.
and they are consistent (Score:2)
Silicon Valley companies disproportionately hire Asians, in particular Asian immigrants, while hiring disproportionately fewer whites, blacks, and Hispanics.
So, they are consistent: they believe that US and European countries aren't producing enough good coders and hire accordingly.
What ever happened to computer science? (Score:2)
Kids also clueless about (Score:3)
structural engineering, gastrointestinal surgery, quantum mechanics, income tax law, synthesizing pharmaceuticals, etc...
Some are calling the phenomenon "being kids".
So much for reintroducing child labour.
It's taken them this long to realise? (Score:2)
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Really, corporations should be doing less of the "let's teach the world to code" crap, and do more convincing people with that hacker spirit to apply their skills and drive to computer engineering, rather than quant finance or law or other career paths taken up by people with that drive.
Sure, but those people would actually want to be paid well. Facebook, Microsoft, etc. would rather foster a future where that person makes what a fry cook does now.
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Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A.
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English.
Unlike you, it would seem.
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Hey now, market forces only work for the rich. They're not supposed to work for their employees!
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And should they actually do so for some odd reason, it's time to change the law to close that loophole immediately!
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Re:Read: IT wages in Europe rising (Score:5, Interesting)
With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.
Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.
Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.
If you have kids, you should introduce them to scratch!
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Erh... yes, that's what they want. Cheap codemonkeys that will push out cheap code. Security? Stability? Whazzat?