Slashdot Mirror
Reading, Writing, Ruby?
itwbennett writes "A BBC article outlines a push to make software programming a basic course of study for British schoolchildren in hopes that Britain could become a major programming center for video games and special effects. Can earlier exposure to better technology courses reverse the declining enrollment in university computer science courses and make coding cool?"
Assuming they do this the way public schools in the USA teach programming, don't bother. They've managed to suck all creativity and wonder from the process by making every activity copying code from a textbook without teaching the theory behind it, or mentioning the possible applications. I've seen so many people take high school level programming courses and come out not knowing how to program. This isn't because they're dumb, this is because it is taught in the same way you make someone memorize a poem they don't want to read. College courses are fine, but public school courses need revision. Creativity and real world applications of programming concepts is completely missing there.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Information Science is a basic science, like any other, and in our world has a lot more immediate practical applications. It should be taught. Why can my son, very bright, in the 8th grade, tell me the layers of the atmosphere and the earths crust and evolution and basic physics, but can't tell me the difference between a bit and a byte? That's crazy.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
With a good teacher there is no need for whiz bang fancy pants hook'em when their your graphics.
They need good teachers. Invest the money in training/sceening teachers properly. Cirriculum and all that other stuff is fluff from the people that want to sell text books and hardware.
Especially if paired with more math.
I was lucky; my dad taught me BASIC and algebra in grade school. I was too young to realize that math was supposed to be hard and un-fun; as a partial result, all these years later, I make a good living off both.
Check your premises.
I was under the impression that computer science was a bubble degree: the latest degree that people with any shred of scientific acumen and no clue where they wanted to go in life acquired as their ticket to an upper-middle class paycheck. So what's surprising and disastrous about the bubble bursting? Isn't that what bubbles do?
I always hear people on slashdot bitching that half the youngsters getting computer science degrees today are incompetent code monkeys at best, and yet then I read stories the next week about the problem of declining interest or falling numbers in comp-sci education.
Which one is the truth? Shouldn't you be happy to see enrollments decline? Aren't you glad to see fewer incompetent, bobble-headed lemmings graduating and going out to make a bad name for all of you self-proclaimed 'competent' computer scientists?
High school intro to programming should fill the same niche as shop class -- to get students interested in creating stuff.
Say what? Is this what average people think programmers and software engineers do? Do they think the kids won't catch on that the reality does not look anything like that?
I have nothing against programming as a part of standard education. It is likely beneficial on multiple levels, not just because it teaches a useful skill but because it forces you to reason about and analyze systems in a somewhat rigorous way.
My issue is that they are apparently faking the real rewards at a very superficial level which generates little value in practice. You won't train a generation of great computer scientists by doing a bait and switch, and history suggests that really great computer scientists are rarely motivated by their ability to do parlor tricks for the adoring masses. Like with many other technical disciplines, the deep elegance that makes it rewarding requires long and serious study that most of society will never really appreciate except in a very indirect way.
It's not just about game theory. Space invaders will teach concepts such as blitting, game loops, event driven programming, arrays + for loops (with arrays, lists, etc), and the use of threading/timed while loops. It will probably be a great example of implementing object oriented programming, and requires support skills such as the creation of sprites in an editor such as GIMP, and sound effects in things like Audacity. It's not a big project, but it does cover a broad spectrum of topics in a very short span of time, and the student will have fun doing it.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Why not just require every student study engineering, so that England can become an engineering leader? It's an equally simplistic proposal to solve a problem as the "require everyone to study something only a few will ever work with to solve a vaugely-defined non-existant problem"...
Ken
"College/University is not a trade school"
Yes it is. Of the people who go to college, only a tiny minority will say it is because they want to learn for the sake of learning. Likely, because learning no longer requires attendance at a physical university. What a university provides is a sort of certification. Everyone with a serious goal in life goes because they more or less have to go, in order to be allowed into certain fields. Getting into those fields makes a better life.
I might agree with you somewhat, so far as college does not teach a trade. It is a costly exercise in bureaucracy and wasting of 4-6 years of everyone's time at taxpayer expense for people who do not want to be there (for good reason). Of course, the source of that problem is opinions like yours - that college has some kind of intrinsic value. It somehow makes you better, hence, it is not a "trade school" which teaches you a trade. If this is the case or not is fairly irrelevant; it is not how it is seen by those in it, so it is not how it is treated by them.
Then, of course, there are those who use college as a buffer of party time between highschool and work. I'd dare say they make up a bigger portion of college population than either learners or goal seekers...
Great Intellect...
First and foremost, programming isn't for everyone. I had to learn this the hard way, by many frustrating experiences of trying to teach people what is natural for me. Some, actually most, people just don't make good programmers. Yes, you can teach them how to do it, but they'll never be able to come up with sensible code themselves. They will know the functions and commands, but they will never grasp the mindset necessary. They will eventually maybe get the how, but never the why. And that simply isn't enough. That way you get rote programmers who will spend their time hunting for code someone else wrote and do some crappy copy/paste programming job. The only thing you accomplish is that this kind of "programmer" will muscle into the work force, push salaries down to the point where even people who could do some great programming stop aiming for the trade and would rather spend their paid hours in some idiotic number pushing job, simply because it's better paid. Like, say, me turning to IT security management rather than IT security development. I'm a far worse security manager than I was in secdev. But it's better paid. WAY better paid.
Then, coding IS already cool. For those interested in coding. I spend my spare time coding now, think I'd do it if I didn't think it's cool and it's fun? And you'll never make it cool for people who don't get an orgasmic rush from nifty code that works, from an optimization that shaves off 20% of runtime, they don't care. They don't bother. They will create code that "does somehow" what it's supposed to do to get over it. For them, it's not a passion but a burden. You get the kind of output that you get from anyone who has to do work he doesn't really enjoy, the one with the least effort necessary.
And finally, to rephrase the first paragraph and explain why people would rather go for BA majors than for engineering: Salaries. The crappiest BA number pusher gets more money than the best IT engineer. People follow the money, it's that simple. And as long as it's better paid to administrate than to actually do something productive, this is where people will go.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In high school... I went to a special one called W.T. Clarke in Westbury New York... I had four teachers which were really amazing. The principle of the school decided that to teach computer programming, he'd hire a programmer. To teach electro-mechanical engineering, he'd hire a robotics engineer. To teach architecture, he'd hire an architect and to teach electronics repair, he's hire a TV repair technician. Oh... did the same for carpentry and other things as well.
He believed that if he could find these people with a love for what they do, who felt that it would be more productive to teach 30 new kids each year than to do the work themselves. The initial pay was that of an entry level person of the field which they were specialists in and the costs to cover tuition to the university to become a certified teacher as well. Upon completion of their degree, they would gain the additional money that had been paying for their university classes as salary. The end result was, nearly every person on my friends list on FaceBook from those classes are now working high level positions in those fields..... or as teachers. That's about a 70% success rate.
A key thing to understand about these courses is... they were elective courses. You had to do well in your normal classes or you'd be dropped from these courses. So, the students in these courses actually did better in their other classes than the other students as well. It's like forcing an athlete to pass their other classes or no football for them.
This system worked incredibly... the problem was, the principle had to fight for this. He demanded of the school district the funds to make this happen. He probably interviewed 50 people for each position before choosing someone. After all, with the investment he would need to make in a person like this, he didn't want to have to do it every 3 years. So he picked the right person for the job. Of course, in that school, he did pretty much the same for nearly all his teachers and in a school with 1500 students, that's a huge job. But, the end result was one of the best schools in New York and possibly the whole of the U.S.. He didn't piss away money on fancy landscaping projects like they do in California. Whenever he got the money to do anything, he improved the academics of the school first and if there was any money left over, he bought a lawn mower. He would even attempt to convince the football team and cheerleading squad to run fund raisers for those things to avoid having to use the normal budget for those things.
Mind you this was in the 80s and 90s. He set aside an area of the parking lot for kids to smoke. He felt strongly that he'd rather keep the students at school even if it meant letting them smoke on school grounds as opposed to having them skip classes to avoid getting caught smoking. These days, the parents almost certainly would lynch him for such a decision. Unlike other schools where the principle was some loser who deal out punishments. He let his subordinates take care of punishments. He on the other hand would take personal interest in any student he felt was going the wrong way. He understood that the kids who looked like "The wrong kind" could often simply be trying to define themselves as nonconformists. If some kids needed a "tough guy" reputation, he'd even pull them across the school and into his office by their ear for everyone to see, then sit down and play a game of chess with them and talk about things. Fact is, we as students didn't fear him for punishments. We feared that he would be disappointed in us... a raised eyebrow from him was enough to put nearly all the students in line.
I can go on and on about him. But the important thing more than anything else is that he made the school what it was. He built a team of the right teachers. He sacrificed new paint in the hallways for better text books. He focused on what was important in a school. People always talk about "The right teachers" and "Higher pay", but in retrospect, I must admit that the key to success is great leadership. Start with that.
I find that, in any profession, there are very excellent people who do the job because they love it and there are other excellent people who do it because it pays well. I feel like you need both kinds of people.
Incidentally, there are also really bad people who do it because they love it, and there are plenty of mediocre people who do it for the money. Those people give both groups negative associations.
As for money, it is true that one can be very happy in life with the basics covered. It is also true that more money insulates you from disruptive events... if a new roof only costs a month of take-home pay, you are in much better shape than someone who has to scrimp for a few years to pay off the loan they took out for the new roof. I wouldn't want to give up too much time for money, but I also won't discount the value of more money. Even marriages are statistically more stable if money is not a recurring problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.