Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Co-opts Ice Bucket Challenge Idea To Promote Coding In Latin America
theodp writes: Microsoft is aiming to offer free programming courses to over a million young Latin Americans through its Yo Puedo Programar and Eu Posso Programar initiatives ("I Can Program"). People between the ages of 12 and 25 will be able to sign up for the free online courses "One Hour Coding" and "Learning to Program," which will be offered in conjunction with Colombia's Coding Week (Oct. 6-10). The online courses will also be available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico. "One Hour Coding" (aka Hour of Code in the U.S.) is a short introductory course in which participants will learn how the technology works and how to create applications, and it offers "a playful immersion in the computer sciences," Microsoft said in a statement. In the virtual, 12-session "Learning to Program" course, students will discover that "technical complexity in application development tools is a myth and that everyone can do it," the statement added. Taking a page from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge its execs embraced, Microsoft is encouraging students to complete the Hour of Code and challenge four other friends to do the same (Google Translate).
Exactly, so if we changed the school curriculum to teach business courses (including sales and marketing) at an early age, there would be competition to companies like microsoft. This would lead to more businesses being created. With more businesses around, there would be intense competition for qualified or even average workers and employee wages would have to rise.
Right now, business is taught at a very late age to students -- near or above the age of 20 and is often prohibitively expensive. In other words, most people are taught to be employees. People with an aptitude for business should be taught early in the same way math is taught at an early age.
Neither of those scenarios happened, so you are remembering wrong.
Pad-like devices showed up in science fiction first. Some of the most visible examples are Star Trek (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). Millions and millions of people were introduced to the concept of handheld computing devices through fiction and lots of those people wanted one.
One of those people was Alan Kay, who was a PhD candidate at the time. He developed the idea more fully into something he called a Dynabook in 1978, long before any company had even thought about anything of the sort.
Science fiction authors gave us the idea and it was so appealing that people wanted it to exist. Companies eventually recognized the demand for those devices and worked toward creating them, but they didn't create the idea or the demand.