More Students Learn CS In 3 Days Than Past 100 Years

theodp writes "Code.org, backed by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, boasts in a blog post that thanks to this week's Hour of Code, which featured a Blockly tutorial narrated by Gates and Zuckerberg, 'More students have participated in computer science in U.S. schools in the last three days than in the last 100 years.' Taking note of the impressive numbers being put up on the Hour of Code Leaderboards ('12,522,015 students have done the Hour of Code and written 406,022,512 lines of code'), the Seattle Times adds that 'More African American and Hispanic kids learned about the subject in two days than in the entire history of computer science,' and reports that the cities of Chicago and New York have engaged Code.org to offer CS classes in their schools. So, isn't it a tad hyperbolic to get so excited over kids programming with blocks? 'Yes, we can all agree that this week's big Hour of Code initiative is a publicity stunt,' writes the Mercury News' Mike Cassidy, 'but you know what? A publicity stunt is exactly what we need.'"

Comments

Writing 32 lines is not "Learning CS"

[NeverWorker1]

Hour of code is not a bad thing, but this didn't create 12M programmers, much less 12M people who know computer science. They averaged 32.4 lines each.

Re: Writing 32 lines is not "Learning CS"

[yahwotqa]

Indeed, but what it _did_ do is expose them to the idea that computers can be tools that do what we tell them to do, and not just magic black boxes for mindless content consumption. Even though 90% of the kids will completely forget about it tomorrow.

Re:Writing 32 lines is not "Learning CS"

[Anonymous Coward]

'More African American and Hispanic kids learned about the subject in two days than in the entire history of computer science.'

So all it takes is 3 days to learn all of computer science? The universities and colleges have been forcing a 4-year curriculum upon students and employers have been demanding applicants have a doctorate degree plus 100 years experience for years. By the standards set by Hour od Code I would have learned everything there is to know about computer science after a month programming my Commodore VIC-20 (Commodore PET BASIC and 6502 machine language - there was no assembler at the time so every instruction had to be POKEd into memory). Zuckerberg and Gates want to commoditize computer programming, software enigeering, and software development so wages drop to less than minimum wage.

Re: Writing 32 lines is not "Learning CS"

[i kan reed]

Long enough to recognize that they do what we say, not what we want.

Re: Writing 32 lines is not "Learning CS"

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Not only that, but:

> "and written 406,022,512 lines of code"

Sounds like a bad 5 weeks I had once 15 years ago.

Is it even possible anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work on web apps, with DB back ends. I need to be able to set up the DB structure, create the queries, set the indexes, schedule the DB backups, then set up the web server, code the back end to get the data, write a frontend in javascript using knockout and ajax to make it responsive and usable. Since we have a small development team each of the three of us has to be able to do all of these steps. This is in addition to the ERP programming and interfaces I also do for this.

Is it even possible for new people to come along and learn all of this? I am able just because I learned as it came out piece by piece, but I keep wondering if new people will ever be able to do the full range of things. With a larger team you can split it up, but rarely do you get a team were each person is fully competent and unless there is someone who can call BS on any part of it there is potential for problems.

I also wonder if anyone in their right mind would bother learning all of this. When we interview people under 30 they are saying stuff like "I do Apple IOS programming and nothing else". I know there is a lot of ageism anti-old people sentiment expressed here on /., but when you actually need something done and can't hire 10 people to do it you can't hire these younger people.

Wow....

[blackbeak]

That's an awful lot of "Hello World"!

Re:Grammatical oversight

[davester666]

Since they are all trained up, we can cancel all the H1B's for programmers/IT.