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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."
I took programming in 3rd and 4th grades. In 3rd grade we started with logo, and then in 4th grade we started writing in BASIC.
That was standard curriculum throughout the State back in the early 80s.
It would be interesting to see how many of us started out wanting to make a game/some graphics demo and then learning how to do it compared to some other motivation for learning programming. I started out that way myself.
Here's what it looks like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMODHilE4qk
Just because the hardware's made in China (we'll see how long that lasts, but that's another issue) doesn't mean the software can be. Software in many cases can't be one-size-fits all. Whether your business is sufficiently different that the off-the-shelf accounting or inventory software doesn't quite cut it or you want your web page to look *just right* and don't feel like playing email tag with some minimum wage drone 12 hrs away from your time zone, there will always be a need to people right here who know how to code. Nevermind all the embedded work that requires being physically present to get it to work.
Society seems to treat programming as though it were something mystical. In fact, it is simply learning how to think and express oneself logically, using a very basic (no pun intended) language. How is this different than learning how to read and write English effectively? We expect too many things to be hard, so we make them hard by our attitudes.
Programming is not special. Programming is the literacy of problem solving.
Facing a required task and then using known tools to construct a method the achieve the required task in logical steps.
There should be less emphasis on "programming" and more on general problem solving. Learning the general method is better than learning the specific method until you need to become as master of the specific method.
Programming can be one aspect of teaching problem solving because programming is very structured. However problem solving skills in general need to raised a lot higher than general grade school level before real programming can be done.
The problem isn't that we don't teach them algebra soon enough, it's that we don't teach them how to think (read: at all). It's not that mathematics doesn't teach people how to think, it does. But only in some kind of sneaky way, and people are assumed to have great logical deduction abilities like it's some inherent intuitive concept. But it doesn't work that way.
Unless you attended a rich and large high school, chances are your exposure to any level of logic is nil. Why is it only philosophy majors are the ones forced to take informal logic (and not even very much at that)? The only way you actually get an adequate exposure to formal education in rational thinking is if you're a logician.
But really I'm just deluding myself, who wants a workforce that knows how to think?
And the United States is doomed
We are, unless things drastically change in politics and the boards of corporations. This is a matter of facts on the ground. It's not open to debate. It's happening.
we should all lay down and slowly starve.
We won't have any choice if things don't change.
We have been handing technology, as a society, to the Chinese for decades now, with the delusional belief that all the high-end stuff will still happen here. I believe it started with Voc-Ed being a place to dump the "dummy" students. This is how I believe we lost the skills to make anything here - that we systematically decided that making anything = sweatshop and if you were smart, you didn't go into manufacturing, ever. We denigrated actual work for decades and anyone who worked in a factory making anything was therefore just some dumb monkey. And you can replace monkeys on one side of the planet with monkeys from another side. That's the thinking that got us here.^1
But transferring the manufacturing base over to China makes it inconvenient for the engineering and software to happen here, so guess where it's going to move.
Go ahead, guess.
Engineers and scientists are already moving to Shanghai.
Unless we stop the haemorrhaging and start building up our own manufacturing base here encouraging students to go into STEM without learning Chinese is a joke and a half.
But I don't see that happening any time soon.
--
BMO
Postscript: I was looking at a Popular Mechanics from the 1950s and there was articles that went on for pages on how to use a shaper and a tip on how to turn a taper using ball bearings instead of ordinary conical centers , and it was just *there* as if machining was a skill that many people had. You don't publish an article in a popular magazine where you deliberate write over the heads over your readers or write something they don't care about. It was expected that the readers of the 1954 Popular Mechanics^2 would find this stuff applicable. Today you would *never* find such an article in a mainstream magazine such as that.
Footnotes:
1. The war on work: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
The first half goes on about castrating sheep. But that's the set-up for the second half, so watch the whole thing.
2. http://books.google.com/books?id=Nt8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA126&dq=1954%20Popular%20Mechanics&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=true
Alright, you make some good points, but I'd argue that manufacturing jobs are leaving center stage anyway.
Look around, we build factories that require a tenth of the labor they used to. We build entire shipping centers that are more or less automated. I'm not sure that we really need manufacturing anymore. If anything China is serving as an excellent stop-gap to ease the transition to a much different kind of society.
I mean, when you get down to it, the problem is really that the amount of product per single skilled worker in a modern, automated factory is so large, that there quite frankly isn't a demand for the entire population to be employed. China has cheap labor now, but machines will become cheaper, and at that point the only thing left is engineering.
How do you mean "there wont be job"? I thought elementary school was for giving kids a basic set of knowledge and skills, not to train them for any specific line of work. Programming teaches analytic thinking, logic, and gives some insight into how computers work and what sort of things they can and cannot do for you. These are useful skills to have in life, even if you don't actually end up developing software for a living.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.