Microsoft, Facebook Declare European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too

theodp writes: Having declared U.S. kids clueless about coding, Facebook and Microsoft are now turning their attention to Europe's young 'uns. "As stewards of Europe's future generations," begins the Open Letter to the European Union Ministers for Education signed by Facebook and Microsoft, "you will be all too aware that as early as the age of 7, children reach a critical juncture, when they are learning the core life skills of reading, writing and basic maths. However, to flourish in tomorrow's digital economy and society, they should also be learning to code. And many, sadly, are not." Released at the launch of the European Coding Initiative — aka All You Need is Code! (video) — in conjunction with the EU's Code Week, the letter closes, "As experts in our field, we owe it to Europe's youth to help equip them with the skills they will need to succeed — regardless of where life takes them."

Comments

early age influences

[BringsApples]

Maybe we should explain how social structure works, and how human desires come into play when mixed with it - rather than teach them how to operate machines.

...oh yeah, the adults have to learn that first...

Re:Apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. How dare you expect a wage that even approaches 1/400000th of Fuckerberg's net worth when you clearly only deserve one that is 1/2000000th of Fuckerberg's net worth. Stop being such a greedy fucker expecting a living wage. Your greed is going to prevent poor, destitute Mark from buying another mansion.

Re:Consumer based economy.

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yeah, but paying your employees anything beyond poverty wages is SOCIALISM!!!!!

Or, you know, it's simply smart business as Henry Ford found out. He made his money back and then some by paying his workers wages higher than he had any necessity to do.

Re:Read: IT wages in Europe rising

[Layzej]

I think the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Group is doing more to address this issue than MS or FB: http://scratch.mit.edu/

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.

Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.

Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.

If you have kids, you should introduce them to scratch!

Re:Apparently

[0xdeadbeef]

If you stuck me in front of a computer to mimic code someone showed me at 7, I'd have thought "okay, great, when is recess?"

Wait, computer time wasn't recess?

I actually think the ubiquity of computers is the reason CS graduation rates have declined since before the dot com bubble. For the millennials, the magic never wears off because computers were never magical to begin with. And kids don't program for fun as much these days because the distance between what they can write and what they see in AAA video games is astronomical.

When I started programming I thought I was the shit when I made a 3d cube rotate on a TRS-80. Sure, it was simple, but it wasn't like I was used to seeing 3d computer graphics on a home computer. Graphics like that in The Last Starfighter blew my fucking mind.

Re:Read: IT wages in Europe rising

[Half-pint HAL]

Scratch introduces kids to a decades-old style of programming that is well past its sell-by date. Let's write a proper functional programming language without all the imperative hacks that SML, Scala etc have and teach the next generation of programmers to think in terms of the problem to be solved, not how a typical CPU works.