Code.org Celebrates 5th Anniversary, Success In Changing K-12 Education Policy (slashdot.org) 36
theodp writes: It's exactly five years since Code.org launched with the video What Most Schools Don't Teach ," noted Code.org in a Monday blog post entitled Dedicating Our 5 year Anniversary to our Partners. "Since then, tens of millions of students have begun learning computer science, hundreds of thousands of schools have begun teaching CS, tens of thousands of teachers have attended workshops to introduce CS in their classrooms, hundreds of school districts have added CS to their curriculum, and forty U.S. states and 25 countries have announced policies and plans to support CS in schools [...] We should start by thanking our amazing donors, particularly Amazon [$10+ million], Facebook [$10+ million], Google [$3+ million], Infosys [$10+ million], and Microsoft [$10+ million]. Whether it's corporate funders, foundations, or individual donors, without your generous funding, we wouldn't exist [...] Changing education policies in forty states wouldn't be possible without the help of Microsoft, College Board, Amazon, and every partner in the Code.org Advocacy Coalition [...] We're particularly fortunate and proud to have had the vocal support of Bill Gates [$4+ million] and Mark Zuckerberg [$1+ million] since day one." Hey, it takes a corporate village to raise a CS-savvy child!
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... in oversaturated market - plenty of slaves for stupid capitalist economy
Don't worry, AI will take care of that problem!
HOMESCHOOL (Score:2)
...Your kids if you truly love and care for & about them.
The US public school system is a failure and a disgrace. They're nothing more than ideological indoctrination centers. They gave up on educating children long ago, as the steady stream of illiterate and incapable-of-basic-math H.S. graduates every year proves beyond a doubt.
Strat
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The US doesn't have a public school system. It has 50.
Tell that to the US Federal Department of Education as they seem to be under the impression that they are in control of US public schooling. That's one Federal department that needs to be abolished, then your assertion would be accurate.
Strat
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But this education is not leading to better workers. It is the most dumbed down of computing, it's training unskilled labor how to use computers. And this is in no way "computer science", it is simple programming. Computer science is large a mixture of applied mathematics, abstract mathematics, numerical analysis, algorithms, electrical engineering, data structures and a mathematical reasoning of them, and much more
Now you don't need all that to become a grunt coder at the modem rung of the job market, b
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They aren't really teaching "CS" in elementary schools. They're treating CS as a job skill and preparing a workforce who can do simple labor. At least they should call all of this "introduction to computer science". It's like doing physics in high school, the most you're doing is replicating experiments and memorizing formulas, you won't be able to graduate from high school and demand a job in physics.
I think a lot of this feeds into parents fears that kids are falling behind. This started in the 80s at lea
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>> getting good at coding doesn't make you good at anything else.
If that's all you believe that Software Engineers actually do, then you are part of the problem.
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Why do we want primary and secondary pupils to learn how to write software? Software engineers make up just 2.54% of the USA labour force.
I think that learning to code is basic civic skill. You want a mortgage? - go whip up a spreadsheet to evaluate it. You want to make an informed vote? - get the data online about how your representative has voted, maybe scraping the data if needed, or gather any kind of data about any topic. You want to heat your house cheaply? - program the danged thermostat. You want to cook something? - heck, just knowing that recipes and algorithms are similar will make you a better communicator.
These aren't questions o
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Follow the money. Who is behind code.org? Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.. These companies are not interested in giving students a better education or making their lives better. They especially don't want to give them transferable knowledge. You see these companies are usually run by economic majors and they know the simple principal of supply and demand. If they can flood the market with coders then they can significantly reduce their labor costs. Plumbers and MDs usually make more money than cod
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Why do we want primary and secondary pupils to learn how to write software??
Perhaps the answer to the question is that many of the people pushing these techno-ed initiatives and the educators championing them don't fully understand technology to begin with. This isn't to say they lack proficiency with the tools (although many do), but technology ultimately is about problem solving - not solution creating. With due respect to my fellow technologists, many of us are so freaking obsessed with our mastery of techno trivia, we can't see the forest for the trees. Worst of all, however, w
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Being a good programmer needs more than just knowing how to be a coder. You need domain knowledge. And you can't always rely on the domain expert being on hand.
Ie, you're going to use a formula that someone gave you in a spec, so you should know how to convert that formula to the programming language and have it give an accurate result in a reasonable amunt of time. Yet it is very common for even experienced programmers to screw that up badly because they don't know how floating point works, they don't kn
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What drivel. Engineering leans intensely on complex math. Try teaching that to a bunch of disinterested, undereducated children. Many (most?) people actually interested in Engineering drop out after the first year in college. Software Engineering is a much easier pill to swallow and leverages technologies modern youth are already intimately familiar with. No kid is going to go home and start designing a bridge, but any kid can go home and make their first webpage or app.
Rule #1 of Engineering: your i
Those numbers (Score:2)
So, one suitably informed teacher for every 10 schools? Will the other schools still be relying on their PE teachers?
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More often, the business teachers. The Business Education endorsement on a teachers license specifically includes computer courses.
The trouble with that approach is that, at least at the middle school level, is that the computer courses are computer apps only (at my school, Word, Excel, and Photoshop).
CS is like automobile tech in the '60s (Score:1)
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...but just so they've been exposed to concepts and can talk about it in layman's terms.
I don't think that's very likely at all. Like all uninteresting classes I was forced to take in high school and University, I hardly remember anything about them. Ask me even the most basic questions about sewing, statistics, economics, etc., and you will get gobbledygook back.
For 99.99999% of kids forced to go through these "CS" classes, the end result will be similar. They will core dump everything they were forced to memorize the day after their final exams, because they don't give a single shit abou