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Steve Furber On Why Kids Are Turned Off To Computing Classes
nk497 writes "UK computing legend Steve Furber — co-founder of Acorn and ARM designer — believes students are avoiding computing classes because they teach nothing but the boring basics. Currently studying why the number of students signing up for computing has halved in the past eight years, Furber said schools focus too much on teaching kids how to use spreadsheets, word processors and PowerPoint, rather than teaching more challenging areas such as programming. 'What schools are presenting as ICT as an academic subject is very mundane compared with what students know they can do,' he said. 'It's as if maths was just arithmetic or English was taught as just spelling. It's not unimportant that you can do arithmetic or you can spell, but it certainly doesn't open up the whole world of interest and challenge, if that's all you do.'"
They can't teach anything else, most "computer science" teach I had in highschool was almost computer iliterate, shit, I even had a programming teacher in college who was typing with 2 fingers.
Another big issue with computer classes is the woefully outdated equipments used. Back when I was in college, my computer class had us print Lotus spreadsheets (yeah, I'm a dinosaur) using dot matrix printers that were already relics back in those days. I remember that I printed my own spreadsheet 16 times to get it to come out right, and each of those 16 attempts came out differently. I was not a happy camper, as you can imagine, and anyone who was not already a computer enthusiast going into the class would not be turned into one as a result of it.
no child left behind and the cert mess = tech just the test and with certification alot of the time they are way off base from the real world or set in a world of free M$ software that in many places will no much to set up how some of the cert tests have things setup.
About 15 years ago.
I did basic on my C64, and various other things on other machines we had at home. Then we had school computing class which taught us how to size and colour a font, put together a spreadsheet and other such guff.
Later I got a programmable casio calculator and programmed that. Somehow it didn't occur to me to actually go into computers until I was 18. No thanks at all to the school.
...and the students learn absolutely dreadful sentence construction besides!
Honestly, your point is very well taken, if I understand it correctly.
The certs you would have to go through to officially teach programming in the schools are so demeaning and outdated, that no programmer would do it -- and I've never met a teacher, even in the hard sciences or tech, who even knew what 'programming a computer' was: they were downright suspicious of the practice, because they couldn't distinguish it from 'hacking'.
They're certified to teach to the test, which means basic MS user skills, and maybe swapping boards in PCs and re-installing...you got it: windows.
The best thing you could do to really educate kids about computing, and not just train them on windows apps is to get them started with 8-bit computers. Yes, BASIC is awful for real development, but it was designed for education and it does this quite well. Removing all the layers of abstraction from modern PCs forces you to really understand what the computer is doing. While the skills aren't directly transferable to modern PCs, the concepts are, and that's what education is all about.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Sometimes classes are outright outdated. I had a course around 1999 which was supposedly about computer programming. We spent the first few weeks with only lectures and an incredibly outdated textbook. The teacher (an otherwise okay math teacher) was clearly well behind the times. He lectured about microcomputers, minicomputers and had no idea that most servers by then were basically souped up versions of typical desktop computers.
The language was Pascal, which I suppose is a decent learning language, but we barely scratched the surface of programming ability. For a high-school level class, it was tediously outdated and slow. I truly hope that by now the instruction has moved along and kids are doing more interesting things. There were other interesting courses offered in things like graphic design, web design, etc. but the core programming class had neither much CS theory nor interesting applications. Worst, if you didn't know any better the content in the course would actually mislead you about the state of computing.
All subjects have the "boring basics". The key is the instructor; a good instructor can make the basics of a field really interesting. Unfortunately, being a good programming instructor is hard, and at the K-12 level it is really hard.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
don't forget the 2-4+ year degree with loads of not tech stuff just to be able to get to the tech stuff and the Non Tech school tech in CS alot of old and out of date stuff and not the more upto date IT stuff.
My grade 10 and 11 computer science classes taught programming, but there was one problem: it was in Turing. For those of you who don't know, Turing is a simple language similar to Pascal that is only used in Ontario. The textbooks are from 1989 (refer to Mac OS 7 and the ICON computer). The funny thing is that the school paid for the IDE (which contains the only compiler in existence), so they wouldn't let students take a copy home (dang proprietary software!). (Un)fortunately, the company behind the language went under and they released it as freeware, along with a PDF copy of our textbooks.
Learning in Turing is enough to drive most people away from computers. The developers tried to make it a more powerful language by converting it to object-oriented part way through its life cycle, so its a bastardized hybrid. No bindings for external things, either; no SQL, no system widget toolkits. You had to work with whatever they decided to build in to the language. Some of us (the real programmers) could work with what we had; most couldn't. By grade 12 we finally moved on to Java, but most of the students were traumatized by then.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Do you know there is a spelling difference between the words "tech" and "teach", right? If you would learn this it would make deciphering your posts much easier. Second on your list should be about splitting your thoughts into multiple sentences instead of one long run-on sentence that meanders.
Computer science was new and wonderful twenty, perhaps thirty years ago. You could learn a large area of the field even in high school. There were things to discover, things to do, things to share.
Then the commodity computer came and software behemoth companies. For almost anything now there are commercial apps which can do whatever you do faster better and at a level of generality you would never imagine. Wanna write a program plot a graph? There's Mathematica which does it in color.
It's very hard to teach anything interesting if the home computer can do it better and faster. The iPhone programming craze did get people interested in programming again, but I guess that's over now.
Computer science has to realize they are now living in reality like other sciences, low attendance, low interest, and students who either get it or don't. I found when I was teaching college math that freshman calc was the worst possible thing to teach. Anybody interested in math would skip it because they got it long ago. So it will be in Computer science.
They know computing skills are a dead-end pursuit in the first world.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
More like, if maths were just learning to use a calculator. Learning to use a spreadsheet or word processor isn't even about computing. If that passes for computing, then driver's ed could replace physics, and home economics chemistry. It's like they thing that if a computer is involved, it has something to do with computer science. But computers are in almost everything these days.
Modern schooling was designed to inhibit education, not further it.
Once you realize that then everything starts to make sense.
The was a great CPU simulator programs on the BBCs and you could step through machine code. We had to write a small assembly program to add some numbers or similar. Of course we also had the office apps lessons with database/spreadsheet/wordproc stuff, mostly using clarisworks.
We also had atari sts in Art and Music departments, and the maths department had BBC micros for things like graphing and simulations on occassion. This was all during the 90's, even my primary school in the 80's had a BBC A and B for things like Funschool etc..
no child left behind and the cert mess = tech just the test and with certification alot of the time they are way off base from the real world or set in a world of free M$ software that in many places will no much to set up how some of the cert tests have things setup.
I don't think I've ever commented on someone's grammar before but, Damn! You want to try that again?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
focus too much on teaching kids how to use spreadsheets, word processors and PowerPoint, rather than teaching more challenging areas such as programming.
Yeah. Why teach the applications practical to 95% of white collar jobs instead of programming, which most kids won't be interested in, fewer will 'get' and hardly any will ever do professionally?
'It's as if maths was just arithmetic or English was taught as just spelling. It's not unimportant that you can do arithmetic or you can spell, but it certainly doesn't open up the whole world of interest and challenge, if that's all you do.'
This is just about the worst metaphor I've seen all day. If you only learn to spell, as opposed to learning speech, reading and literature, you aren't actually doing anything productive. Yet what's the common trait of all of the software listed above? It's called "productivity software." School isn't fun. You don't do what you want, you learn what [has aribrarily been decided] you need.
Besides, I know programming is hardly a glamourous, high paying job, but it sure as hell pays a lot better than being a school teacher. What kind of castoffs do you want teaching your classes?
Whale
Yeah, because before that, teachers NEVER taught for the test.
Oh the joyous days of pure theory and understanding the subject matter, I'd miss you if you ever existed.
For education to progress, we need standardized testing. Period.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Bring back the educational BBC TV programmes on computing/programming.
Heck, just do reruns and bring back the old BBC Model B. Kids will learn far more from that than they ever will at schools today.
I have never taken any computing subject at school because of how boring they are. I learnt a lot just by experimenting by myself, buying books, magazines and watching TV. Once upon a time, one used to be able to get great information from magazines and terrestrial television but nowadays, they don't get any more technical than discussing font size and if a case mod with LEDs will make the computer perform better. Pioneering stuff was done years ago on TV, like encouraging people to hack their TVs and pipe the audio to the cassette audio-in on their home computers to try to download a program. It was fun stuff.
Not doing any computing classes at school didn't put a crimp in my career... except perhaps that I never learned to touch-type properly.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
The problem for me was that teachers knew absolutely nothing about technology and were expected to teach it. True pupils were not interested in using a word processor or Power Point... we were already writing programs and creating new technology. High school and university were only review. The slow pace of most computer "classes" merely hinders and creates frustration.
bluHatter
It's likely that "Joe the Dragon" is a bot, that takes a few items picked from a talking points file and runs them through some really bad sentence construction AI.
I am the IT director of a school in the US. I can see first hand that the only thing the "educators" are interested in is training students to use application software. Not only that, it must be the absolute latest version of a certain company's office package. It's so the students will get "real world" training. WTF?
While it indeed is important for students to learn to use these tools, by the time some of these students make it into the workforce, the software that students are trained on (and cost so much money to 'license') is 'obsolete.'
What happened to the concept of teaching concepts? How to produce a document using a word processor and not Microsoft Word 2007? I learned word processing with AppleWorks on an Apple //e. I can churn out a basic document in minutes with any word processor I use. How many kids 'trained' in the exclusive world of Microsoft software will ever be able to do this?
I'm very lucky. The administration in the school I work at is not like this. The administration mostly use Windows machines, but the students and teachers all use a mix of Linux thin clients (LTSP!) and Macs. The office package we use is Open Office.
In fact, when I was forced to go to school I tried to avoid all classes because they all taught nothing but the boring basics.
Whenever I'm forced to use Word or Powerpoint at work I find them so unintuitive and their menu layout so archaic and unlike every other programme out there that I understand why people need "training" to use them.
Took me 20 minutes of googling to put some values in a table the other day.
I once had an observer remark to me that I was the fastest two finger typist she had ever seen. I have honed my skills since then. I use *SEVEN* fingers now! Maybe by the time I retire, I will use all ten.
There is no "IT personnel shortage" until salaries go up.
As I point out occasionally, "Information Technology" is taking the same path that "stationary engineering" did almost exactly a century century ago. In the 1880s, it was a really big deal if you were the one who could get a steam engine and generator to work together and light up a factory, business, or town. By 1910 or so, it was a routine job. Today, there are still about 25,000 stationary engineers in the United States. It's a good union job. There are electrical engineers designing new equipment, but they're nowhere near the user and have completely different training than the people who install and run the stuff.
That's where IT is going, and it's almost there. Don't worry about it. Just use your iPhone like a good little consumer, and buy your software from Microsoft.
As a sysadmin who has to program from time to time: yes, spreadsheets and word processors are completely unimportant in many regards. They're different, the skills migrate pretty easily, and the likelihood of having to use the same spreadsheet in 3-5 years is negligible.
Basic spreadsheet computations, or Access stuff? Sure, I suppose. Just please don't use a horrible Microsoft Press book: crammed full of "click here" goodness bullshit, they're mind numbing. They're worse than New Math.
Basic programming is, for a beginner, very satisfying - whether it's shell, perl, or VB. "Look what I made" is very horizon opening, regardless of whether it's a crayon drawing, an ash try, a clock, or a highly advanced artificial intelligence. :)
The problem there is that any AI written by a high schooler is likely to be several hundred iterations more complex than the average school teacher, "computer" teachers included.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I had pre-CompSci in 7th and 8th grade, taught by an old mainframer.
He gave us challenging computer science problems. We turned them out on C64s.
When the work was done, out came the joysticks..
Thanks, Barry!
In this regard anyway. I remember I avoided PC classes all through school. Why waste elective credits on stuff I already knew and listen to a teacher, who can't progam their own VCR, try to tell me how a PC Functions or tell me the way I type is wrong?
Nothing agianst the treachers but in most cases they barely grasp what they themselves are teaching and its going to be a generation or two before this changes because the technology is new and still in a very rapid state of change.
I remember I didn't take a computer class until high school when they started offering A+ and CCNA and such as elective credits. I took keyboarding because it was a prerequesit, they wouln't waive it. The teacher knew nothing about what he was doing and was infurated with me because he gave me what he was sure was a whole periods worth of work to anybody, and I finished it in 5 minutes. I finaly got kicked out of his class when he sent me to the principals office because I would not respond when he called me "BOY!" It was one of those southren types where everyone in his class was either "BOY!" or "Sugar" He wrote me up for being disrespectful because I pointed out I had no idea he was talking to me because there were about 12 other boys in his class.
Luckily the principal realised how stupid it was and waived the requirement since I obviously could already type faster than I could talk.
Way back before there were PCs I learned BASIC in a graduate school course. Today, that is taught, if at all, in elementary school. SURELY today by the time a student gets to college, he or she knows all about word processing, spreadsheets (Long live Lotus 123!) and Powerpoint. Courses on these subjects are largely superfulous. No one with any brains needs them. I see my local community college offers them for the "gotta get retrained" crowd, but other than that colleges might take a good hard look at their courses--and eliminate them.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
when I was in college, one of the requirements was computer class.
I knew nothing about a computer, what I was taught was how to work a spreadsheet, I almost failed the class.
Because of that experience I didn't touch a computer for ~10 years, until I finally broke down and purchase a 486dx2.
If only I was taught something 10 years ago, it might not have taken me that long to truly appreciate them.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
During my basic- and highschool studies I have learned MS Office on 3 different years. And you know what, the studies were limited to Excel, Word and Powerpoint. Time well spent, man!
I played Oregon trail and Carmen Sandiego in my computer classes. You had to build spreadsheets? Suckers!!
Qxe4
You may possibly win an award for the most unreadable three lines I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Just for starters, let me introduce you to my pet, the "alot": http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Probably a majority of US students dislike math and science classes because they are viewed as "hard". Since they are usually college entrance requirements and computer science usually is not, they are less avoidable in practice.
I remember taking the mandatory computer class back in HS 10 years ago. It was mostly about how to send an email. Attachments are so hard to figure out!!!
We did a little bit of html and the final project was to code a website with certain criteria. Of course, the teacher didn't know squat and I usually was correcting her, so I made mine very satirical and ended up getting a 0 on it because she hated me. I passed the class by one percentage point. Worst grade I ever got.
Moral of the story, public school teachers suck.
I taught myself programming from 8th grade. Basic, C, Perl, even some FORTRAN and Z80 assembler. After high school, I did an internship at a DOE lab, coding in C. When I got to college, intro comp sci in Java was so easy, and boring, that I just couldn't take it. The school wouldn't let me try and CLEP to higher levels, and I wasn't willing to suffer. I switched departments, studied literature and history, and now make my living doing computer stuff (most of my coding is in Perl these days, and some C, mostly with FreeBSD and some Linux. Last job was Linux-only).
I could probably benefit from taking a rigorous data structures/algorithms class, but I'm not mostly a programmer but a system administrator. I started out with old shit computers as a kid 'cause I was interested, kept up with it, and it keeps me employed now (unlike nearly everyone that I had class with in the English department). The point being, those with the interest are going to have the interest, and just need the right opportunities to excel. Being forced to learn Excel isn't the same thing.
The big problem is probably educators and laymen confusing 'microcomputer applications', ie, basic office computer skills, with computer science and/or IT. If I thought I was in a computer science program and all I ever did was talk about a quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog, well, I'd give up, too.
I'd have certainly enjoyed my comp sci courses more if Steve Furber had written all my textbooks. He's completely lucid and hits the balance between technical and readable. His ARM SoC Architecture title is a freakin' gem.
Reply to That ||
"Steve Furber — co-founder of Acorn and ARM designer — believes students are avoiding computing classes because they teach nothing but the boring basics."
This is something you could survey students about and determine directly. My alternative hypothesis is that students avoid CS because (exactly like math) it's just too hard for them. My community college students find stepping through a flowchart and assigning some variables almost overwhelmingly, unimaginably difficult.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I would start with Python, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
You fool, do you really want to let loose all the HS students in the world to create Skynet?
the high school attended by their website designer didn't offer any web design classes - the top paragraph of each page was entirely unreadable.
I'll agree with you in principle, I think the path should be something like LOGO, then BASIC, then Pascal or C.
I don't think "computer classes" should deal with programming at all. Programming classes should teach programming. When most kids take "computer classes", it's because they want to use the computer in ways they currently can't. The vast majority of kids would be bored silly writing programs. What they really want is a class that would be more accurately called "Here's how to do neat things with your PC that you don't yet know how to do". Neat to most teenagers is learning to photoshop or edit MP3 files or edit movie files.
They're bored with spreadsheets and word processing in those classes because A), they already know how to do some of that stuff... they grew up with it, and B) it's boring work. Stuff you do at a job. Kids want "computer" to = "fun".
Kids are so used to using computers from an early age that a class on word processing in high school is analogous to a class on "How to use a pencil". They already know the basics. So the answer isn't putting in more stuff that they won't like, and is much harder to do than edit a paragraph in word.
So it's basically time to phase out the "intro to computing class", unless you have, for instance, a lot of poor immigrant kids that have never used a computer. In most schools, they should just break classes up into different subjects now. Here's your class on photoshopping. Here's your class in BASIC. Here's your class in audio editing. Here's your class on Access. The time of the beginning one-size-fits-all computer class is done.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Joe the Dragon could be a really smart 7 year old child, a severely autistic adult, a non native English speaker, or dyslexic. Don't understand it? Ignore it and move on, it's just spam to you. But taking time out of your life to try to train/insult him/it is pointless.
Take off every 'sig' !!
The problem I encountered was that the teachers themselves are often unable to obtain any other job. I have over 12 years of teaching experience. 2 at the local college. The rest as an Independent Consultant to the local colleges.
The problem starts with a salary issue. I could earn the same salary at the local college teaching first year electrical apprentices basic math as an advanced programming course. My salary was based on education * years of experience. The Union (er Teachers Association ensured that). Any decent developer, got a job developing for twice the salary. Those that couldnt get a job applied to the college. Admin complained about the quality of people, were constrained by the Union. I applied because my wife is a school teacher and we thought it would be good for us both to have similar holiday schedules. I lasted exactly 2 years.
I was hired at a time when windows 3.1 was just released and none of the staff new anything about windows programming. I spent my first year developing content. The 2nd year was spent teaching where, and I kid you not, I taught the course in the mornings where 2 of my "students" were teachers who repeat my lesson to different classes in the afternoon. When I got radical and suggested we teach an Assembler course so that the students would actually learn about CPU's, registers, memory, IO etc. I was told by a veteran teacher, "I have been teaching here for the last 17 years and all of our students seem to be doing well, what makes you think you can come in here and suggest curriculum changes?" (my assembler course would have replaced one of the COBOL courses that he taught. I further fell out of sync with the rest of the staff when I proposed a 4 for 5 program where staff was required to work 1 year out of 5 in the industry to gain some relative knowledge of what was really going on out there.
Today, when I look at my nephew wanting to do what uncle does, I looked at the course I used to teach. They still teach flow charting, there is still a COBOL course, a course in project management. A network management course, where the students actually follow the numbers to create AD groups and users with no actual explanation of what a domain is. (one of my staff is taking this course so that he can upgrade his status at work)
Graduates are having a hard time finding work with increased expectations. My own nephew is under the impression that he will earn 50k out of school. However, he is not interested in the local college because of the course content.
To get students interested, we need to entice quality teachers, not the unemployed. There truly are some great teachers/profs, but in my experience they are the exception, teaching as a lifestyle choice instead of a career. In order to do that, salaries need follow industry to some extent. We also need to remove things like teachers associations or at least structure them to create industry comparable practices and policies.
Once an enticing environment is provided, the students will come.
it's because a lot of the basic computing courses started out as typing classes. You used to have classes teaching students how to use a typewriter, emphasizing typing speed and accuracy. Then as computers replaced typewriters, they taught the same things, but on a computer instead. Also, as basic computer proficiency started becoming needed more and more in jobs, they started requiring a course in general computing. So the typing class added in how to use the rest of an office software suite, and possibly some other simple things (like how to use the web) and that is where we got the generic general computing course.
Now why the more technical computing courses are not as popular is that they often require thinking. Why take a course where you will learn something in when you can take a much easier course that still fulfills the same graduation requirement.
I guess I'm failing to see the justification for an emphasis on programming. Take a look at your average company. Sales, Marketing, Purchasing, Accounting, Operations, Distribution. And then of course you have IT.
How many of the people in ALL of those departments need or use programming skills?
Now, how many of those people in ALL of those departments need or use Office skills?
Exactly. Yeah, computer classes may be boring or "basic", but remember that 95% of people use computers as a tool to get their job done, and therefore need or use nothing more than the "basics" anyway. And the demand is likely dropping because students can now easily learn these skills at home due to software availability that wasn't there 10 years ago. Doesn't take much to become "functional" in Word or Excel.
Yeah, some kids are going to be bored but they have to learn the basics. All these years later, I remember being in college taking some 3rd-level programming course (had ComSci prerequisites with ComSci prerequisites) and one of my fellow students was totally befuddled by a floppy disk. No idea what to do with it, no idea how to copy files onto it. The whole concept was new to this person. This had to be the person's second year (minimum) as a Computer Science major and they'd never copied a file from one computer to another. And, no, floppy disks had not just been invented the previous winter. They'd been in the consumer marketplace for over a decade. How did they get this far in this line of education without learning how to do something so basic?
Kids need to learn that boring stuff like file management, word processors, spreadsheets, email, etc. because those are fundamental tasks that they will need to master for ANY job that doesn't involve salting fried potato slices. If they can test out of that and move on to more advanced stuff, great. But not requiring them to learn the basics would be like not requiring them to learn how to manage a household budget or not require them to learn how to read and write.
"how to use spreadsheets, word processors and PowerPoint" are not Computing classes or computing skills. They are examples of office skills and should be classified as Business Courses.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
My RSS feed in Firefox trimmed the title down to:
Steve Furber On Why Kids Are Turned Off To C...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Computers are a tool. Perhaps 20 years ago we needed to teach everybody how to use them, but these days kids grow up surrounded by computers. They learn the basics of using computers the same way they learn to walk. The idea of a "computer" class is as silly as a class dedicated to lathes. What you do instead is integrate teaching of what you can do with computers in the classes where it makes sense. Spreadsheets go in financial and stats classes. Word processors go in writing classes. Programming goes in logic classes. A single class dedicated to one use or one set of uses of computers is an outdated idea.
Clear Skies fan?
Programming is not computer science. Computer science is pretty much applied mathematics. Some people call it "theoretical" computer science, but you can't call something science if you're not moving forward in the theory. Students who are taught that C++ programming is what CS is all about get to college and find out they're wrong and flunk out when they can't grasp complexity theory or even automata theory.
I've seen a number of students who have no idea what CS is all about come in thinking they're going to design video games by getting a degree in CS. By design I mean, "I think we should have this cool sword with magic powers in the game." The students just have no clue what CS really is. People who don't know what CS is think that we're masters of MS Office and expect us to know how to fix their OS when its full of malware, because that is what most people think we do. So before we blame curriculum for teaching basic computing skills instead of programming, we need to educate these kids on what CS really is and what a computer scientist will most likely do in the real world.
I was the ACM president at my university, and once during a meeting a kid rose his hand and asked, "What classes do they teach you how to hack in?" I laughed, but he was serious.
\For almost anything now there are commercial apps which can do whatever you do faster better and at a level of generality you would never imagine.\
That's such BS, there are tons of tools (even commercial tools) which REQUIRE programming ability to make the most of. Take matlab, yes, most of it's features are technically available through the GUI, but if you want to do anything at all interesting with it (like, let's say, multivariate analysis of fMRI data), I think you'd be hard pressed (it would be impossible) to do it without writing a program to do it.
It seems to me that you attitude is the real problem, yeah I could do it in excel with clicky buttons, or I could write a python script that does 10 times more 10 times faster. Not to mention that if someone learns how to program, learning baby stuff like excel and power point won't even require classes.
I recently tought a bunch of psych kids how to write some matlab to run their experiments and analyze their data (see sassy fMRI comment above) and It seems ridiculous that anyone could hope to be any sort of exciting scientist without the ability to at least to some simple data handling in a scripting language.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
When they teach everyone the basics, they're doing exactly the right thing. You don't need to teach Mozart how to create songs, and programmers are no different. If someone is interested about the subject, school cannot teach anything more about that subject. It's the other people who really need the computing skills. Those people who are interested in it will create some god awful software that is impossible to use, and thus word, excel, spreadsheet etc skills are absolutely necessary for everyone. Teachers will know this, they have seen it many times, some people create difficult-to-use software and others will need to learn how to use that. They're doing the same with other subjects too. You'll learn things you would prefer not to know anything about. But those things are necessary to learn because there are large number of people who know that stuff very well and anyone not knowing the basics will be in huge disadvantage.
Word / Excel is also definitely easier to teach, and they're probably doing a bad job even at that.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
I'm a high school student, and last year I was taking a special program that let me work on a passion project, in my case Java programming. However, in order to graduate I needed CTS credits, so they informed me I had to take the school's Computers 20 course. I decided to take them both at the same time, and ended up finish the whole semester long Computers class in under a month since it was nothing but Excel and Word, time consuming but boring, then got back to my real computer work. I feel sorry for all the kids taking the Computers class who had to spend the whole semester playing solitaire because they'd finished all the ridiculously simple assignments and didn't have the opportunity to do anything more complex.
Or *think* they can do. Have you seen what TV and movies imply are not just possible, but downright easy to do with a computer or network?
True, but if one cannot do the former ones well, they will never accomplish much on the latter ones. Understanding the tools of your trade is important.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I was taught Basic on TRS 80 Model III equipped computer labs in Jr High / early High School. This didn't even come close to representing what I do today (I don't even script much, just corrections on the Dev team's templates when I can - I'm time-cuffed to Photoshop mockups for every site and mobile client they throw at me which is a ton of work in of itself) - however - it was useful in demystifying computers to me back in the day and presented a basic method for problems solving and error checking that applies to just about everything I've done since.
Start with something that encourages non-linear problem-solving and product creation and you've got yourself a person who will use that to start some really cool shit in the future.
It should also be noted that the best college courses I took were classes that applied abstract problem-solving to all walks of life (good design can be applied to all lines of visual thought - if you start with basic problem solving and work down to the technical components later (typography, color theory etc) for instance).
As a child of an era before standardized testing, I can tell you that theory and understanding did exist.
We passed and failed based on our understanding of the subject matter.
If you lost a competition, you didn't automatically get a trophy for participating.
Children got left behind because they weren't intelligent enough to keep up. Those kids now work for fast food restaurants and government.
"Lame" - Galaxar
The problem of educational technique is only 1/2 the problem, at best. The real problem, just like in the rest of the sciences, is working conditions. As long as it's OK to call people "geek" to their face and pay them shite, most smart kids will continue to gravitate towards business degrees because that's where the money and respect are to be found. No hard science job pays as much as the manager that they answer to, as long as that situation remains so will low enrollment.
Kids are turned off to computing classes for the same reasons they are turned off by the idea of cooking their own dinners and washing their own dishes. Fast food is easier because someone else has prepared it for you and you can just eat it with your hands and throw away the wrapper.
Most people really aren't interested in fixing their cars, cooking for themselves, sewing their own clothes.
They want instant gratification by way of packaged products. ...well obviously not EVERYONE wants this, but many people do.
I took computer classes in high school over 20 years ago on Apple II (Plus, E, C models if I recall ...). There wasn't a whole lot of interest at that time so maybe 10 people (15% of the grade in that school) took the class.
This was taught by a 50+ year old _professional_ teacher who had the curiosity and gumption to learn all this on his own, teaching in a town of 2500 people. The teacher's approach was interesting.
He told us to learn how to use a spreadsheet, word processor, etc. like an adult. Here are the manuals. Ask questions of your peers then the supervising teacher in the lab if you are really stuck. The assignments are due in x weeks. _Maybe_ he spent one class going over the basics _what_ you were supposed to be able to do with these tools not _how_ to use the tools. His approach instilled that teaching particular tools in Computer Science is a waste of time except as a mechanism to teach underlying principles.
In class we did a quick overview of history, basic computer architecture, and quick review of math logic for several classes then he taught how to program in basic in subsequent classes. Funny how I recall him teaching STYLE as well as function whereas even in university STYLE was almost completely overlooked.
That was all before Christmas. Second term was Pascal taught by a different teacher. I had a class conflict so I did that class using manuals in a couple weeks LOL.
A couple of years ago I tried to get my (now) 15yo son interested in development. He was all excited because he envisioned writing his own video games and what not. You can understand his disappointment with "Hello World". I can't blame him with all the amazing technology that is out there these days. I was dazzled at computer technology (TRS-80) when I was his age with things like Oregon Trail.
But offering negative reinforcement to poor habits is socially useful. If Joe the Dragon took the time to use written language properly society as a whole would benefit by his contributions to the discussion.
in that it is not a preliminary requirement to learn programming. I have tried teaching kids to program using scratch and I can tell you they love it. In fact, they really don't need much in the way of teaching to be able to express themselves pretty well in scratch. No, the problem lies with the parents and businesses that want "proper" computing taught (you know, spreadsheets, word processing) not this arty-farty-abstract programming crap. To a large part of the population computing means word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoints. I seem to remember this was a big complaint against the OLPC; it did not support real applications like excel.
It's as if we all want our children to become office drones that have no idea how anything actually works.
Nullius in verba
Computers were fun back when the reward was worth the effort. Poking data into the display buffer, writing short bits of code in machine language to open the door of CD drive -- the direct connection between software and hardware -- that's what I liked.
Today the best way to do that is probably to build a robot or some other sort of embedded system. Watching your Lego-bot roll around the floor and respond to input according to your rules is a lot more engaging than calling Qt to put up a button or OpenGL to draw a square.
It's obvious pretty quickly that 'Hello World' isn't exactly the door to Narnia.
Kids that REALLY want to do programming will put up with the irrelevant or poor classes. I sure did. I really don't think that is an issue and certainly not the main issue. I can think of LOTS of other reasons why kids don't want to sign up for computer science classes:
Outsourcing. Not many people want a career that can be easily sent anywhere in the world.
Discouraged by people already in the field. For many of us, the joy of working on computers disappeared years ago. All it takes is having to fix code written in India for any length of time and you will start telling people not to get into programming
ADD/ADHD. People may debate this but I am convinced that most people that eat processed foods will develop some level of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). The combination of excito-toxins (like MSG) and high amounts of white sugar in most frozen and processed food is sure to mess up any kid. Children who can't focus are NOT going to become programmers if they can help it. Although it would explain some of the REALLY crappy code I've seen.
Stress. My perception is that the stress level has gone up as the system complexity and dependency has increased. I don't believe the pay has kept up with the stress for most IT/Development jobs. Of course now people are happy just to have a job.
Having worked in IT and software development for over 15 years and seen the steady decline in job satisfaction for most people I'm amazed that ANYONE would choose to work in the field now unless they were physically handicapped or had some other unique reason that ruled out other professions.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
For starters what I learned on Lotus 123 is still relevant today on MS Excel and clones (openoffice). I doubt high school students have any idea what a spreadsheet is capable of, and how you can organize data in different ways or perform on-the-fly calculations. Using a spreadsheet to track a garage sale is easy and useful, you can know what was sold and which family member gets the money for it without much effort (less effort than writing names on every price tag). And if you can do that you can apply that same basic understanding to using spreadsheets in a small business or at a deskjob.
You don't have to learn every nuance and be an expert at it, I just think students need to what is possible and what tools are available. And then they can seek out and learn how to use those tools as needed.
Kids in the 90s were getting into CS en masse because they had the hope (nay the expectation) of becoming millionaires before turning 30. That's not the case any more, so those kids do something else. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing: Better have fewer people but with a better motivation.
The education system as a whole is to rewrite from ground up. Everything is a complete joke, from teachers (mostly) to content, ratings, rules. At least here in Quebec. You get out of there and the only thing you can think about it is how it was useless, boring and that you just lost the best years of your life.
Computer science was new and wonderful twenty, perhaps thirty years ago...
exciting scientist without the ability to at least to some simple data handling in a scripting language...
I do LOTS of data handling/programming and I really don't think that counts as exciting. When I was 17 and learning C, that was neat because we did some things that we had never seen before. Now I would think it would be damn near impossible to do something truely creative, exciting and new in a good learning language that could be done by high schoolers in an hour a day.
I go to a UK school and they offer nothing in the way of programming. I have just finished all my ICT education at 15 and the most help I got from any teacher in the last 7 years was one lending me a book because I asked them, otherwise I learnt nothing. I can appreciate that learning how office applications work is important but they could at least acknowledge that microsoft isn't the only company that makes software, but that is beside the point. They can teach how to use basic application in a year or so as I found, but then they go over the same applications again, and then again, and then again with the students learning nothing apart from how to swap windows off the games they are going on when the teacher comes near. The school I go to actually achieves really well in all the areas of learning but ICT is a complete blind spot. They no longer teach ICT for 2 years but only 1 of the 5 years in the school. They claim that you get your ICT education in other lessons but for the past few years the teachers have been turning to me for help when things fail, so I don't see how I am meant to be learning anything from them, let alone programming. One result of this is that in a year of over 100 pupils I have only found one other programmer and he doesn't do much. I agree totally that the state of computing education is appalling, with the only programming being in the final year of school and many schools not offering the qualification, including mine.
One can certainly do better than MS Office application training to get kids excited about computer science. Game design, if done right, works well in public schools and after school programs. Have a look at Scalable Game Design using AgentSheets http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/ Check out the data (over 78% of the middle school girls want to continue). Even see the conservative TX Congressman McCaul comment on game design. Best of all, in addition to evaluate motivational issues we can now even begin to measure computational thinking http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/VL10comp_thinking.pdf
Amen-- one of the things that put me behind the most in college was that my computer course (late 90s) was more apt for clerical work-- spreadsheets and windows word processors, zero programming, languages or even the Internet
Basic programming is, for a beginner, very satisfying - whether it's shell, perl, or VB. "Look what I made" is very horizon opening, regardless of whether it's a crayon drawing, an ash try, a clock, or a highly advanced artificial intelligence. :)
Maybe it's the graphic design bias in me, but that's why I could never continue on with programming. Ok, so now what..I made a bunch of lines of text make the screen do something. WTF do I do now? It's a different type of creativity...one I evidently don't have.
Programming is no different than any other "boring" subject if they do not teach a "purpose" along with the facts and busy-work. How many times do high school students hear or ask "what's the point of learning this?" with the belief that once out of school they will never use it. Public schools do a horrible job attaching any meaning or higher context to "the boring stuff". Take trigonometry and more advanced maths for example. What a difference it might have made if they gave examples like how orbiting a probe around the moon is all thanks to math. Or explaining the benefits of reading Shakespeare. Or [insert anything seemingly tedious here].
Hell, my schooling was so mediocre I didn't even know what an engineer was. Now how was I supposed to consider something like that as a career path if we were left in the dark as to what actual jobs there are out there?
Simply a character reference to the failings of the no child left behind program
It is not as easy as it sounds (sort of like programming....not as easy to turn out good maintainable code as it sounds..)) I sympathize with all the people who had bad teachers, and poorly led schools, and problems with rules. But on the other hand, teaching is hard, esp when technology is constantly changing, you have to prepare a new lesson plan every year, and you have a wide range of students in the audience.... I think that rather then expecting the educational system to provide good comp sci classes for the very, very small number of students who want them , a better solution is comp sci clubs, with infrastructure (suggested books, contests, etc)supplied by some sort of foundation a la FSF; this way you get the teacher who wants to do it (its basically overtime, so you have a higher proportion of people who want to do it, as opposed to 9to5vers) and you only get the kids who want to do it, so you have fewer problems with people at all diff skill and interest levels.
When I started being a professional programmer, I was naive.
I had no idea how demanding the work was, in terms of hours expected.
Perhaps they are being informed of more than just how to be a programmer, and therefore choosing other studies and career choices?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I think my point still stands. Yes there are those tools which require programming ability. But there are two things which also show even in your examples.
The first is that the people using these tools are applying computers to their domain. This is different from a computer science class.
The second is that very few people learn tools like matlab just for the heck of it. Exceptions like me exist but they are rare. Also I cannot see how you can teach a course in matlab in a computer science class.
(in defense of my attitude: I don't have one, but I can borrow yours if you wish)
I started in 1999, and got paid to do Java (J2EE stuff).
I wonder what the 'language de jour' is nowadays?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It may be that students are also being informed about all the IT and programming offshoring that takes place.
Why take classes and study for a profession with currently low job prospects, unless you are in a country that is a popular offshoring provider?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
As a child of an era before standardized testing,
Which was when? Standardized testing is more than 80 years old. The tests we took in elementary school in the early 80s dates back to 1935.
Make your education system work like your medical system? Yeah, that works really well.
This is so true, The UK’s computer education courses are a joke. I spent three years at college and I learned more about computers form pissing about with Linux, Networking at home, Playing with Windows server and messing about with active directory, Working in a production environment.
When I was working in a repair shop there was a lad who worked there part time while at university. One day he came in and asked me to help him with his project, It was on studying viruses. His first question was how to get them, I said just go to any shady porn site and you bound to pick up a few. At this point I though wow! this guy gets straight A’s and is at Uni, and he doesn’t even know where to find viruses. He did have a descent excuse as he was Muslim, So at the mention of porn sites, He went bright red and really quiet. I was laughing until he asked me the second question, which was how to study them without trashing his system.
That’s when I stop laughing and said to myself, The UK is so screwed if this is the level of talent that's going to university.
At the moment I am jobless so I thorough I might as-well get a degree while there is a recession. Beats doing nothing on the dole and why not, If it get’s boring I can just dropout and get a job. I went to an open day and it did look quite interesting, But at the end of the day I thought, The degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. An MCSE or LPI certificate will give you a better chance at getting a job than a degree.
The amount of times I have seen students come out uni with all the knowledge pack in there heads but no practical skills what so ever. As soon as you put them in a production environment they fall to bits, With the stress of keeping things running. It’s not like I gave them important tasks like maintaining servers, I learned that the hard way, When I first started I was a lot less hands on with the junior techs, But after all the stupid things I have seen them do, Back-end server rooms are now guarded like a prison, YOU HAVE TO SIGN IN AND OUT. My boss thought the cavity search where a bit too much (joking).
Now I continually shadow them to make sure they fear my wrath, So they think twice before committing configurations.
As a student myself, I've been taught little more than.. well, I haven't been taught anything. For six years we had nothing more than 'typing' classes which didn't do a lick of good for the most part for the student body. Following that, they would teach things such as Power point, MsWord, and using spreadsheets. If your lucky you'd get a bit of PS in there, but the teacher knew less than most students who'd never used it before. ( If that says anything at all ) In general, all this builds up a very negative image about computer classes in a student's mind. When you finally get to stop typing drills by tenth grade. There are classes offered for C++ here, but they offer very little. One learns to make a very simple application, which is basically a calculator with text boxes. I found that insulting considering I taught myself C++, and I was hoping to actually learn something beyond the bare basics. If they wanted to grab hold of a students interest ( at least a student like myself ) they could offer a 3D graphics design class of some sort. There's many students with great ideas, and given the tools they could express their ideas in more than two dimensions. Along side that, there are many application suites that are powerful, free, and full of documentation for schools to use. A school could teach the use of UDK, for example. With the amount of effort required to get stunning visuals, it would likely catch the eye of many students. It wouldn't be hard to remove the guns either, if that is a problem. ;)
The teaching of the engine, could also create possible job opportunities in the future for some students, considering how widely used the engine is.
The CS teachers aren't the only ones to blame. Integration with other courses would be useful. Learning how to write boring toy programs in C is well - boring. However, write a program that well help you with your chemistry homework - now that starts to get interesting. Teachers across the curriculum should be supporting writing, reading, math and programming (CS). . .
Maybe it's because of how the school system has now been feminized to accomodate girls and women, and thus making it more difficult for boys.... so basically boys aren't interested in the feminized CS and the girls aren't interested in CS anyway.
I recently guest-taught a class at the local high school for kids who might be interested in computers.
It was a bit rushed, but in 45 minutes I taught them basic binary counting and how to do XOR. They learned how to flip pennies to create a one-time-pad and transmit unbreakable encrypted messages. The bell rang just after they started decoding, but they walked out of the class still working the logic on their sheet of paper, so I think they were into it. CS can be fun as long as theory is only a tool to enable an application.
Materials: whiteboard, scraps of paper, a handful of pennies.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
From http://www.bash.org/?670375:
<JonTG> Man, my penis is so big if I laid it out on a keyboard it'd go all the way from A to Z
<JonTG> wait, shit
I remember when I was back in High School, they offered a computer applications course that was so boring that everyone I knew had completed everything assigned for the week in the first day. Honestly "education" about computers is about as lame as it gets. Half the time what they are actually teaching in the class could be taught by the students themselves...
In french we have Informatique and Bureautique.
The first one being Comp. Sci.... the Second one being secretary work.
School usually don't teach the first one and think that kids learning the latest very specific version of whatever Microsoft released must be good.
What a shame!
Why Kids Are Turned Off To Medical Classes
or
Why Kids are Turned Off To Law Classes
Ask yourself why these are not the headings of more articles, and then you will have a better understanding of the “nerd” crisis.
The reason that computing, science, and other “nerdy” occupations are not popular is not because “it’s so hard”, but because the carrot is so comparatively small. Medical schools have a reputation of grueling academic and personal sacrifice, but they still thrive.
The future outlook in “nerdy” fields as of late is not so good. I know that I would not recommend them to any but the most dedicated. Maybe it’s arrogance that allows “nerds” to think that their work is somehow so much more complex than medicine and other professional positions that their field is suffering a lack of interest; ignoring the fact that the entire western technical and scientific sectors are in unprecedented economic turmoil.
Maybe it’s because the science and computing fields lack strong influential governing bodies such as the medical and legal licensing organizations. “Nerdy” fields are not as well respected in the West as they are in the East. Employment is very volatile, and extremely anti-family. There is no long term security, and ageism is rampant. The list just goes on, and on.
I know of people with PHd’s in physics etc. that can’t find decent work; that is ridiculous! They roam around from college to college so often that I have nick named them, “gypsy professors”. Once upon a time, they would have been considered national treasures.
It’s just economics; Too many people, too little need for “nerds”.
Anyhow, I just got out of a 2-year course in "computer science", and this is how I remember it:
The 'teacher' (if you could call him even that) honestly gave me the impression that he was picked up out of a crowd of random people. We were supposed to be taught programming in C, along with a whole set of stuff about operating systems and so on. For the first 4 months the teacher attempted to give us notes copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, with absolutely no editing whatsoever. Needless to say each student ended up with an *extreme* excess of paper. I swear this guy was going to kill an entire forest. That was actually the entirety of the class by the way, it was something like this:
Note: There was *no* homework or any kind of assignment for the *entire* first year. I don't even know where he got the marks from, because he only actually gave us 3 tests..
Then it got bad. We moved onto the programming part of the syllabus. Within the first class he had made it impossibly clear that he had absolutely no idea what he was teaching. We even jokingly asked him if he knew what he was doing. (After he consulted the textbook for the hundredth time) At least he was honest enough to admit he didn't.
So anyway, I had spent three years before this class devouring a whole set of textbooks on C programming, so I was *fairly* proficient in it by then. I was instantly appointed to 'the guy who wrote the demonstration programs', 'the guy who had to come in at lunch against his will to explain how the code worked' and so on. It was your average 'free and idle class' right up until the point when the head teacher decided that we all had to actively participate in the class. (i.e. Not fall asleep) I spent the classes until then doing my homework and stuff. The instant this new 'pay attention' rule got put in, that was the end of computer science for me. Every class meant hours of sitting there listening to the teacher read a paper. There was no joy. He insisted on reading at snail pace. The rest of the year will be abbreviated for the sake of speed:
1) Almost everyone started skipping the class.
2) Almost everyone got in trouble, daily
3) The complaints to the head teacher went completely unnoticed.
4) The students who were worried formed a study group and tried to learn 2 years worth of lessons in a few months, once it became apparent that we were doomed.
5) The finals came and passed, these were the results: 2 people passed. The class had in maybe 20-somebody people. (I almost failed, I wasn't surprised)
6) We finally got to leave. Most of us took computer science because we didn't have any better options, and because it looked easy.
Now I start computer science at the university in about 20 days or so, I was so terrified of this happening again that I only chose computer science as a major because of a coin flip, and because I'm fairly certain that I'll need whatever diploma I'm gonna get this time to get a decent job out here.
Now, the reason I'm so terrified? Simple: We've heard even worse stories from the other schools out here.
Sorry for such a long post but as you can imagine I'm pretty upset about this guy single-handedly ruining my last years of school and I wanted to tell my story.
There really isn't a moral..just a story.
No "spreadsheets" or "word processors" or "Power Point." That's not Computer Science.
It has to be programming. Not because kids need to be able to program in java,basic,pascal,sql,C,fortran,cobol or whathaveyou, but because programming is thinking. Programming is problem solving. Programming is planning. Programming is logic. Programming is mathematics applied.
That's the stuff you walk away with. Long after the language is dead, you have learned to think.
I actually took a 1-credit "How to use a Macintosh" course at Stanford. Of course, this was in 1984, when that was a big deal.
(The 128K Macintosh, with one floppy and no hard drive, wasn't very impressive. It's worth remembering that it was a commercial flop. "A machine for the intensive study of wait icons", someone wrote at the time. Not until the Mac was built up to 512K or so and had a working hard drive was it actually useful.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was at secondary school in the second half of the 90s, and what seems to be being complained about here is exactly what happened, but is now being misrepresented. At my school they had "IT" lessons from years 7 to 9, then introduced an "ICT" GCSE the year after I made my choices. It was intentionally an ICT course (spreadsheets, word processing and using computers in general) rather than a Computing course (learning about the computers and how they work). At college we had A Levels in ICT or Computing, with ICT being a more advanced version of the GCSE (complex spreadsheet formulae, I assume) and Computing getting into binary representations, coding and stepping through apps. It still wasn't rocket science to someone who tinkered in their own time, but it was all covering what it said it would cover and there were definite differences if you wanted to use computers or understand them more.
There are a lot of "super students" here which is nice. As a teacher of I.C.T. in the UK I wonder where you all are? In my last cohort of post 16 students there was only one who was considering Computer Science at University. That said, he did very well, but would have clearly preferred more programming modules and fewer collaboration/office/business units, as would I, however without a whole cohort interested in the more academic side it's difficult for schools to justify offering a course/module. This is why I've started a club in year 7 which goes well beyond the I.C.T. curriculum and into areas more suitable for Computing. Perhaps if we can build an interest in Computing as a discreet subject from ICT we can offer both and cover differing types of student. That said I'd also like to avoid the situation where a students first foray into programming, happens in a multimedia unit and involves AS2!
Another problem is that some students know how to program before the class starts, and naturally these students will be bored when the teacher goes through the basics. That is difficult to avoid. The teacher cannot afford to focus on the top 50% of the class. He has to make sure that all the students understand what is going on, but one solution is to split the class in two and give some of the students a project to work on while the others are read the book.
I won't say where I went. But, if they get up in front of you in orientation and proclaim how proud they are that they designed the entire CS program around what the business school alumni ask for, run like hell. At least, if you are there to actually learn something as opposed to becoming acclimated to the PHB run world, do so. You'll get a better education from a community college.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I never had any decent tech classes in school or CC. In HS it was "business apps", or "Office 2003 for the Completely Computer Illiterate." In CC is was Computer Applications, or "Office 2007 for the completely computer illiterate." The annoying thing is that I wasted my time on this class because someone talked me into trying for an AA with an emphasis in business, when I should have been taking my calculus classes to prepare for that engineering degree, which I went for when I got some more sense...
Once you get to a university, or I guess a large CC, things get more interesting.
Personally, I love C. It was in fact the first language I learned and the one I used almost exclusively for about 4 years.
Also, after taking a required Intro to C class, consisting of a wide range of technical knowledge of the students, I can't really say the average student wants, or can handle, more advanced architecture/programming/miscellaneous computer knowledge.
Using computers in an efficient way requires programming ability. Computers are programmable machines - if you're not programming them, you're just using them as a substitute for a less useful machine. If I had a pound for every time I've seen someone who 'didn't need to know how to program' doing a repetitive task for hours on end that could have been automated with a few minutes of programming - even simple macro programming - then I'd be rich. We're not teaching people how to use computers, we're teaching people how to be used by computers.
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As an IT professional of 26 years and a father of two, I am certainly doing my best to steer my children away from IT. I want them to do something that contributes to the world, helps others and provides a rewarding occupation. A computer is a tool, and nothing more. It should be only a small fraction of our job not the central focus of it. My kids can already do more with a computer than 90% of the people I've ever worked with or supported. In one hour I can teach them more about how a computer works than any high school or college course could in a semester. There simply is no reason for IT classes especially if they're more than a year behind.
I have no worries that we'll still have programmers and technologists for the future. Those that have a knack for and enjoy technology will pursue it on their own, take technical courses and find jobs doing what they enjoy. Others will have jobs that utilize a computer in some fashion but have no need to understand why it works. A large percentage of the population gets by just fine with no daily computer usage at all.
Call me a Luddite or a doomsayer, but I think people should learn much more important skills such as communication, hunting and construction. One of these days there will be no more computers as we know them now. Either technology will become so advanced it will be an integral and automatically understood part of our lives or it will disappear all together.
Are you drunk or just an illiterate fifteen year old?
Just curious.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Kids don't need computer classes. They *grew up* with computers. Computers are no more mystifying to them than telephones, stereos, toasters, microwave ovens, or refrigerators. Do they teach classes in how to use those things?
It's middle-aged people who need computer classes. Ten or fifteen years ago it was the elderly, but most of them have now taken the computer classes they needed. They were retired and had time, so hey, why not? The middle-aged people, who were busy working at the time, never bothered, so now they are unemployed and don't know how to fill out an online job application. They're the ones who need the computer classes.
The kids could *teach* the adults how to use computers, if they had the patience for it, but most kids are a little short on patience when it comes to such things. Anything they've known for more than a year is "kids stuff" and anybody who doesn't know it is "dumb" and they don't want to take the time to slow down and explain everything.
I'm assuming here that by "computer classes" we're talking about basic everyday stuff schools always want to teach, like how to create documents and surf the web. Kids (especially ones who might some day want to go into an IT-related profession) could benefit from courses in more advanced topics, of course.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I spent six months doing program reviews in schools all around the state of Rhode Island. Because of my IT background I evaluated more IT focused programs.
At one it was a business applications class. One of the projects the teacher had them working on was a payroll spreadsheet where they'd have to plug in deductions, etc. then do a manual look-up for the tax amount.
In my evaluation I noted that perhaps they could teach the kids a little VBA. VBA itself isn't difficult. The heavy lift if you will is deciphering Microsoft's object model for the various applications. But once you master one, you've got em' all.
When I mentioned this to a school psychologist friend of mine he said that it was a valid idea but subversive because education is mired in bureaucracy.
That's so wrong I don't know where to begin. There are all sorts of cool things you can only do now around programming that were either a pain or impossible a couple of decades ago. To take your example, rather than wasting my time on just getting the computer to plot a graph, I can focus on right away producing some graphs of really interesting data (that I can get live off the web with another 6 lines of code).
;) )
Or take Lego Mindstorms - build robots, program them, then call those programs via your cell phone - that can be pretty cool if you're 10. Or take StarLogo - with short canned scripts you can simulate whole antheaps, tweak a few parameters and see how the emergent dynamics change.
Those are on the purely elementary level, if one is willing to put more time into it the scope becomes pretty much unlimited (using the Emotiv mind reading helmet to control that Lego robot, for example, and while we're at it let's attach a real laser to it
These days, you can go straight away to doing cool stuff with programming - the only reason it might seem boring is if you got a shit teacher!
My 10 year old taught herself how to use Powerpoint and now she makes professional looking slide shows about animals as a way of ENTERTAINING HERSELF. She could teach her grandparents how to use Office, if they had the inclination to learn it.
Kids nowadays are growing up surrounded by computers, and their young, pliable minds pick it all up far too easily. A formal class on the subject would only appeal to kids much further down the economic spectrum, the kids whose environments aren't populated with an abundance of electronic devices. How many kids do you know that would be interested in a computer class that taught how to use a keyboard and mouse?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
It could have something to do with the bottom falling out of the IT job market....
The fact that companies like to outsource those jobs to India....
People don't want to be considered corporate baggage and paid like a day laborer....
Have figured out that most IT jobs are not exciting, but soul sucking cube jobs with little hope of advancement.
Now also make the requirements stiff, and the courses somewhat harder.
Attach a stigma of never getting laid in a college setting...
Gee I have no idea why enrollment is down.
Better hire someone with a business degree to figure it all out, its too complicated for mere mortals.
It is quite simple. In the old days, my parents worked in the needle trade at a sewing machine, and got paid for piecework. Today, it is the desktop and the pay is in proportion. Who wants to work at the lowest of global salaries. So choose a better profession. (Electrician, Plumber, etc)
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
You know, I'm less offended by the fact that these classes only usually teach the basics and that the teachers know very little, and more offended by the fact that programming was just called an important skill. I know how to program somewhat myself, and I enjoy doing it, but I am getting extremely tired of people pushing for mandatory classes in school that they deem 'important'. It's only important if you're actually going to use it! "But, some people don't know what their careers will be in the future!" Well, then, they can take the same classes they're forced to take now, or be fired from whatever job they attempt to acquire due to the fact that they didn't learn what they needed to. Going by the logic people are currently using, in the future, kids will be at school the entire day learning a wide array of useless information that they will forget in the future simply because of the fact that they may use it in the future. The only classes that should be mandatory are useful classes that almost everyone will need, such as basic math, the native language(s) of your country, history, etc. This is absolutely insane. Forcing kids to take useless classes only encourages failure, due to the fact that they likely won't be interested in them, and if they fail them, it'll affect their overall grade, and they might even fail the entire year. The current educational system is simply broken, and adding 50,000 more mandatory classes isn't going to fix it. That said, I once had a Visual Basic (ugh) class where the teacher thought I was a 'master programmer' or some such because I knew what a function was and was able to make labels on the screen move. In fact, the entire class was impressed at that display. I knew more than he did in the first couple of weeks of taking the classes than he did, even though he had been teaching it for three years. Sadly, I'm not joking.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Here are two factoids guaranteed to blow your minds:
1. This stupendous class was taught in a Montessori environment.
2. This Montessori environment was a Dallas (Texas) Public School
Could this happen today? No fucking way.
The school is now a 'special' school for immigrants.
I was fucked out of pre-high school algebra by a grading process that allowed me and my buddy to grade each others papers.
A+ all the way..