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Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic, and Blockly
theodp writes As teachers excitedly tweet about completing their summer CS Professional Development at Google and Microsoft, and kids get ready to go back to school, Code.org is inviting educators to check out their K-5 Computer Science Curriculum (beta), which is slated to launch in September (more course details). The content, Code.org notes, is a blend of online activities ("engineers from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter helped create this tutorial," footnotes explain) and 'unplugged' activities, lessons in which students can learn computing concepts with or without a computer. It's unclear if he's reviewed the material himself, but Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is grateful for the CS effort ("Thank you for teaching our students these critical skills").
The first thing I saw when I got to the third course beta was a picture of three goony looking creatures, two of whom were Gates and Schmuckerberg. Seriously. Then I clicked on "Computational Thinking" and there was a message "Students use the steps of computational thinking (decompose, pattern match, abstract, algorithm) to figure out how to play a game that comes with no instructions." and a button that said Finished. Continue to next stage. I'm thinking the developers of this website might want to learn how to program before they teach others. For a real hoot, checkout what happens when you click the aforementioned button. Seriously? If this is teachning kids how to program, I'm Rip Frigging Van Winkle.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's not in the best interest of those of us who are engineers. So naturally we get kinda snarky when they ask for our help selling these courses.