Programming — Now Starting In Elementary School

the agent man writes "The idea of getting kids interested in programming in spite of their common perception of programming to be 'hard and boring' is an ongoing Slashdot discussion. With support of the National Science Foundation, the Scalable Game Design project has explored how to bring computer science education into the curriculum of middle and high schools for some time. The results are overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that game design is highly motivational across gender and ethnicity lines. The project is also finding new ways of tracking programming skills transferring from game design to STEM simulation building. This NPR story highlights an early and unplanned foray into bringing game-design based computer science education even to elementary schools."

Comments

Not all educational methods agree

[AK Marc]

My nephews are being pulled out of public school after some issues my sister has had with their education (specifically, NCLB and such encourage schools to identify children as disabled if they are slow, then assess them at the 16th percentile - mainstreaming them - then, when the test come up, if they are hurting the school, bump them down to 15th percentile - which lets them be moved, on paper at least, in with the droolers who can't even eat without assistance, who are NCLB exempt, resulting in a class of student who are explicitly left behind because of NCLB, but that's what you get when you let Presidents who run on an anti-education platform "reform" education). But I looked at the school that she's putting them in, and they link to: http://drupal6.allianceforchildhood.org/fools_gold (probably as an excuse for being too cheap to buy computers, but they claim it's bad for the children to have computers in elementary).

Ironically, my sister, sending them to the anti-computer school has bought them a laptop each (well, "bought" being stole one of my old laptops and given it to one them, and bought the older one his own).