The US Economy Needs More "Cool" Nerds

Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism. Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds. Educators and technologists say that two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation adding that the Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates too narrowly on programming. 'We're not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,' Cuny says. The NSF is working to change this by developing a new introductory high school course in computer science and seeking to overhaul Advanced Placement courses as well. The NSF hopes to train 10,000 high school teachers in the modernized courses by 2015. Knowledge of computer science and computer programming is becoming a necessary skill for many professions, not only science and technology but also increasingly for marketing, advertising, journalism and the creative arts. 'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"

Comments

The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[eldavojohn]

Rather, the burden of change should be placed on the populace (parents especially) and media.

I'm going to make some statements with absolutely no sort of proof, weight or even statistics behind them. Statements which need no proof because if you've gone through the American educational system, you know that what I am saying is the truth.

Football (really sports in general) is more important to teenagers and parents than computer science.

Computer science is far more practical/pragmatic (and really productive for society as a whole) and monetarily rewarding later in life than football.

This isn't pressure from the kids. Kids don't develop these hierarchies of what's more important than other things on their own. They get this from their peers who in turn get it from their parents, teachers and--most importantly--the media. Football is the entertainment industry. There are a small percentage of high school football players that go on to hold all the wealth. All the wealth is controlled or pushed through a single league--the NFL. Kids don't realize that their chances of playing in the NFL are equivalent to winning the lottery. And they pass up much more applicable things like math in order to be better at sports. This is what's wrong with the picture. Don't blame nerds for not being iconic enough or cool enough or social enough.

This has slowly turned as shows and parents have realized that the brilliant nerds they graduated with--the ones that spoke Klingon--actually went on to do really cool things with technology. Not only are they really cool but the whole world is trying to throw cash at them in exchange for their services. Compare that to captain of the football team.

I don't want you to write off sports entirely, a healthy body is necessary to live a long life and moderate exercise is actually good for your intelligence. What I'm asking people to do is when they sit down as a father and spend three hours cheering for their team, they should realize that in order to instill a more pragmatic value in their child (who watches and mimics their every move) they should turn around and spend an equally amount of emphasis on how important math, academics, computer science, etc is to their child.

That's not happening. Our economy is suffering from irresponsible parents breeding a generation of gamblers. And by and large they lose--there's just not enough money in entertainment to go around to every high school football player. There is, however, more than enough money in technology to go around to every high school hobbyist that got out in the real world and applied their knowledge.

I'm not a parent but I'd like to ask all the Slashdotters that are parents that have pushed their children in sports and physical abilities to devote more time to that than reading or studying: why do we do this to our kids? And secondly, do you realize you're creating an ecosystem for other people's kids when your kids reinforce the idea that sports are more important than knowledge and they are the path to success?

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[tixxit]

People like to watch things they can relate to. I think most people revere real skill in talent in any field, whether that is singing, math, business, or what-have-you. Einstein is as much a household name as Elvis is. However, your average person cannot go pick up Einstein's special theory of relativity and read it. They can, however, play some of Elvis' music and bop their heads to it. It is a lot easier to (poorly) emulate a football player or a singer then to emulate a mathematician.

Oh really?

[KermodeBear]

'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'

Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.

Re:Oh really?

[Nadaka]

You think thats bad, they just moved me to a badly lit closet in the basement, completely surrounded by boxes. And someone took my red swingline stapler.

Re:Oh really?

[thenextstevejobs]

'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'

Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.

This story speaks to me in a lot of ways.

My only exposure to anything related to programming before college was HTML. I had no idea of the 'magic' of programming until I was in a college level programming course. Which I was only in because it was a requirement for electrical engineering classes I was interested in because I wanted to understand synthesizers and analog circuits better.

I grew up under a lot more pressure to be an 'artist' or creative-type than engineer. Most of my friends are from this world as well. From the outside, computer science looks pretty bleak. My idea of it was as follows. You sit at a computer terminal for your entire life, typing. And no one even reads what you write. If I was going to sit at a computer, why wouldn't I at least write for an audience? Why would I choose a job that seems solitary and unexciting? It seems like what you'd think being an accountant would be like.

Having just graduated and spent the last few years doing programming internships, it amazes me how wrong I was about the rewards of programming. No one told me the 'power' I would wield, the infinities of computing, the vastness of what you can express with programming language. That I'd confront hundreds of problems with thousands of solutions, and use my creativity and cunning to apply the most elegant and effective one. That the 'barrier to entry' of creating your own startup that could influence millions of users is little more than some education and a laptop and a server in your closet.

I feel like I found a goldmine that no one was hinting at. It is a primary goal of my professional career to expose more kids like myself to programming. The sentiment of the article is right on. Computers are not leveraged nearly enough in the fields I'm interested in. And it's due primarily I think to a misunderstanding about what programming is, and how it feels to do it. I encounter this firsthand often in Linguistics (also something I focused on in college) where many problems of data collection and analysis are considered impossible by my peers but understood as a solvable engineering problem to me.

I hope that this continues to be in focus. Too often it is a dichotomy between being a 'computer-person' or not, and I think many of us who were into other things got sucked into computers when we discovered them. It's a deep field and difficult to get a handle on, I think, coming from another area. But the benefits are too great to ignore.

We have enough.

[girlintraining]

We have enough raw labor resources in this country to meet any technology demand. Don't blame the culture or this lame-ass idea that people are afraid of being labelled nerds. If I made six figures, they could call me the pink tutu goddess of networking and I wouldn't mind.

The problem is that businesses don't want to pay highly-trained and specialized workers more. They've tried outsourcing, right-sizing, downsizing, globalization, and every other way possible to screw people out of wages. And curiously enough, we keep coming back to the same problem -- no matter how big you make the labor pool, the required training and experience required to do these jobs demands a certain minimum income. Keynesian economics, I'm looking at you -- your adherents continue to believe that if they keep expanding the labor pool they'll reach a price point they want. Well, good luck with that...

Affairs

[FlyingBishop]

Clearly, Bill Gates, and some of the other titans of the industry need to bite the bullet and have some very public, scandalous affairs so that the media will start talking about how immoral and terrible people software designers are. Then suddenly sportsmen will become model citizens and no one will want to go into sports anymore.