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Programming — Now Starting In Elementary School

Posted by timothy on from the deprogramming-starts-after-college dept.

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."

6 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. What do you mean, "now" starting? by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? by phaserbanks · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yup. Started BASIC in 3rd grade at public elementary school in Tampa. Fast forward today: I asked my son what they do in his computer class, and he said "we made a song in Garage Band". WTF

    2. Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? by gman003 · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, it won't be "irrelevant", because it's some of the most fundamental elements of programming.

      Things I learned in that Logo class:
      variables and assignment
      IF-THEN-ELSE statements
      WHILE loops
      FOR loops
      GOTO
      Functions

      With the exception of that last one, what, really, is different in modern programming? I still use every one of those, every day, except the goto.

      The syntax is unimportant. The API is unimportant, as long as it's simple, and visual enough for a third-grader to "see" the results of his program. The important thing is teaching the basic programming elements. Hell, the important thing at that age is teaching that a computer is just a machine, that it's not some magic box. I've seen *adults* who can't grasp why a computer is doing what they told it instead of what they want.

    3. Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Lack of funding my ass. There's plenty of money to spend of laptops and HD projectors and electronic whiteboards and new sets of math textbooks with new sets of politically correct glossy pictures every other year. It ain't the money, it's the lack of an adult in the room to decree that it's the math that's important, not the glossy pictures. My dad showed me his 5th grade algebra textbook from 1950's Soviet Russia. The size of a DVD case, not a single picture, but all the math you need to learn in a simple package. And it probably would cost $20 to write, fact-check, print and distribute here in today's dollars.

  2. Statistics of motivation by imbusy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:A shrinking market by bmo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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