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New AP Course, "Computer Science Principles," Aims To Make CS More Accessible
theodp writes: "CS Principles," explains the intro to a Microsoft Research talk on a new Computer Science Toolkit and Gaming Course, "is a new AP course being piloted across the country and by making it more accessible to students we can help increase diversity in computing." Towards this end, Microsoft has developed "a middle school computing toolkit, and a high school CS Principles & Games course." These two projects were "developed specifically for girls," explains Microsoft, and are part of the corporation's Big Dream Movement for girls, which is partnering with the UN, White House, NSF, EU Commission, and others. One of Microsoft's particular goals is to "reach every individual girl in her house." According to a document on its website, Microsoft Research's other plans for Bridging the Gender Gap in computing include a partnership with the University of Wisconsin "to create a girls-only computer science Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)."
society 40 years ago: learn a trade. computers are for nerds and bean counters.
society today: jesus christ everyone, from day laborers to housepets, must learn to write code.
The problem isnt that CS isnt accessible, its that its fucking hard. its why everyone isnt a mechanical engineer, or a physicist. and the demands arent exactly clear. Do you want C coders who churn out low level device drivers? or do you want devops hackers that write auto-reply python scripts for email farms and stand up python salt pillars? its two rather different skillsets. Or shall we get right to the point: profiteers are sick to death of paying a disproportionately living wage to a set of highly skilled workers.
and it wouldnt be slashdot without an obligatory rant from my front lawn as a greybeard. have you seen kids today? i mean actually seen how they use technology? they want E and I devices, cookie clicker and kesha. Kids today dont want to learn how or why their cloud storage works, but they want to maintain the illusion that they are somehow profoundly skilled users of their technology for getting garageband to install and upvoting the latest dreck to come out of their favourite pop star. Theyre divorced from everything but the most fervent memes, so unless you can propose a way to make object oriented reusable code as popular as kony 2012 or the latest malala freedom fighter, this wont work. Things like Pi, adafruit, and any other flavour of linux except ubuntu will forever be the love affair of the neckbeard. You cannot turn a herd of children beaten into blind tech consumerism into an organized group of kids that want to learn transcoding and class instantiation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Isn't this the same crowd that says there ARE no differences between boys and girls and therefore girls should be in represented equally in STEM careers?
Yet the way they intended to remedy the imbalance is to create curriculum specifically for girls, who are no different than boys.
The last fifty years or so of social history appears to have passed you by.
Yes, having failed to correct left-handness in many people but succeeding in correcting black women's hair so that it can be straight we decided about 50 years ago to take on the task of correcting women so that they have the same professional and sexual goals as men. We've made a lot of progress but we still have a long way to go. A lot of women may complain and object, but we know what's best for them so we'll make those decisions for them.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.