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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)."
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.
They want to "reach every individual girl in her house." I foresee ten million restraining orders being issued soon.
I wish my sons had access to such things. They have the interest but these classes tend to be awfully expensive, plus I no longer have "open" computers they can play with (tablets are great at what most people spend time with, but they are also limiting).
GIRLS AND MINORITIES ONLY! Back to your trailer, white trash!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
A lot of the boys that become interested in computers also have problems relating to other people, epecially to girls their own ages. Given that they probably also don't have 'the right stuff' from the perspectives of a lot of the girls around them, they might become slightly embittered towards girls due to a lack of relationship success with them, and when these boys are grouped together, as it is cheaper to educate several students at once, the environment is generally hostile towards girls, so those girls that are actually intersted in computers are driven away both by their notions of the boys and by the boys own actions.
Unless you can find a way to break this cycle, I don't see anything else working as much more than a band-aid to the problem.
I'm actually in favor of gender-segregated junior high. Give the kids a chance to learn how to deal with their new hormones when there's not really much option to showboat for the other gender.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I am all for making any form of education more accessible to any group. But Separate but Equal seems short sighted. What's old is now new....
Can someone please explain to me what this whole "Let's convince/force/cajole/firehose women into CS" thing is all about?
*Why* is it so frikkin important all of a sudden? Why is there no similar push in any other field (think firefighter/truckdriver/constrution)?
Have I missed something important? Are women no longer considered smart enough to make their own choices regarding careers? Must we big smart men carefully explain to them why they *want* to go into CS?
What happens when this magical girls-only experience ends and suddenly the real world rears its ugly head with (God help us) *men* in the actual workplace? Perhaps we need to have some girls-only workplaces as well? But wait, what about when the workday ends? There might still be some *men* out and about. We need a girls-only city to make sure no disgusting boys hang around with their home-grown CS interests...
And now I'm all out of sarcasm. Thanks internet.
I guess my question boils down to: "Why force this interest? Why force this new brand of 'make-no-sense equality quotas' to *everyone's* detriment?"
So... when you *specifically* want to create a class *for girls*, your though is "Hey, let's take out the hard parts, and make it more of a course about all the stuff *around* the actual hard part". You just basically told girls "don't worry yourself about the really hard parts. This is what *you* need to know." Are you sure you don't just want to make it a typing class instead?
Fuck that noise.
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.
So, why all of a sudden are we taking input from Microsoft and Google on the education system?
These are companies, with their own agendas, and who only see the world through their own myopic view of making money with technology.
In what way do we consider either Google or Microsoft to be qualified to be involved in education?
The same clowns who are driving usage of foreign workers are suddenly going to cure the world by making sure more girls know how to code? Why, so they can not get hired because they expect a higher wage than someone in Mumbai?
Sorry, but taken as a whole, Microsoft is doing as much to undermine the point of getting an education in CS .. because they're actively part of the bits of using H1Bs, colluding to keep wages down, and making it more difficult for workers to be mobile.
So you'll excuse me if I see this as little more than some self serving PR.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Feminists are always saying there are no mental differences in men in women. And because of that, the gender disparity in CS must be due to sexism.
Now they're altering the content of CS curriculum to appeal to women, and it is apparently working.
So if women do actually need to be taught CS differently, why is all that dark matter sexism still necessary to explain it?
In fact I'm pretty tired of going over to talk to a (male) colleague and they either can't or won't answer the question but instead will ramble on about something slightly related but nothing to with my question; or they'll be so passive-aggressive about any question that you have to know the answer beforehand to be able to ask the question in the precisely right way that they are willing to answer (think about talking to Dick Cheney about torture).
Of course, I'm ignoring that Russian girl who didn't know how to formulate an if-statement. And then there are those brilliant guys I've worked with which I still can't figure out their code - but it works just fine.
The point of an AP course, in particular, is to get college credit for work done earlier. What college is going to give credit for a course like this? Maybe towards some sort of "Sociology of Computing" degree?
There are gender differences; you don't see it so much in ability scores, but you do tend to see it in how boys and girls learn. There are, I believe, some advantages for separating boys and girls for some classes, but certainly not all. The tricky bit, however, is that, on an individual basis, some kids simply don't fit the gender stereotypes. Some girls like being hands-on and active; some boys prefer to get their answers from reading and watching.
In a perfect world, you'd pair the right kid with the right teaching method, but that's not always possible, so you make compromises ... like gender-specific classes -- which can also help boys in some cases. FWIW, a couple years ago, news and infotainment stories based on all-boys programs were all the rage in Canada (specifically that elementary school education had become too feminized with too many female educators), so, while the current media frenzy is focusing on girls' achievements, there is a degree of parity in the overall arc of the coverage.
As for the current controversy, Google and MS aren't in the business of being SJWs; they're in the business of making money. And the research strongly suggests that:
The financial benefits of greater gender equity are undeniable. Extensive global research conducted by Credit Suisse, Catalyst and McKinsey & Co. examining the link between women on boards and stronger financial performance of Fortune 500 companies has been cited in numerous publications. Examining the return on sales, return on invested capital, and return on equity, their research confirmed that companies with women on their boards of directors outperform those with the least number of women by significant margins in each category.
Source (with cursory review of the literature): http://www.theglobeandmail.com... Note: Credit Suisse is not some backwater, liberal college spouting pseudo-scientific gibberish; they're a well-run capitalist organization that makes no bones about being in it for the money.
You want people with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences working together. It might take longer to reach a decision (or finish a project), but it's likely that the decision will be better for it. Monocultures are suboptimal for decision making (the research from WWII on is quite solid on this). Google and Microsoft are not pushing forward with trying to get more girl coders from some sense of goodness and charity; they're doing it because they see a business case for it. The gender equity aspect is veneer slapped over a business decision to make it 1.) seem like a good thing for society and 2.) make it easier to shake money loose governments to improve their own workforces.
You don't need basic computer education early. You need basic math education early. You need people to learn the basics of arithmetic early enough that you can move on to other things later, but still before high school -- other things including Boolean logic and alternate number bases as well as algebra, geometry, trignometry, and the usual.
Girls drop off the tech track (CS, engineering, etc) because they are intimidated (wrongly) by the boys who come in with "bench skills" already formed -- the boys have been tinkering and taking things apart and building and coding and have their own toolbox (literal and figurative) already. The girls see that, and don't think they will be able to compete -- an inaccurate conclusion, because success in engineering school does *not* depend on having the resistor color code already memorized, nor on having memorized the API's to three dozen Python libraries already. Success comes from the deeper analytical skills.
Girls need tinkering opportunities that will build their bench skills. When they have their own toolkits (literal and figurative) then the boys will no longer intimidate them.
Math is a different issue. The critical years for developing the self-perception that you belong with the math crowd is the same years that girls are trying hard to fit in. The population density of girls in the USA (and it seems to be a problem for us, not for other parts of the world) who enjoy math is low enough that it is hard to fit in socially and be "mathy". For my daughter, we found a math camp (Mathpath.org) where the population of girls was high enough that she found a peer group of girls where it was *cool* to like and be good at math. That made a huge difference.
There is no systematic barrier to women becoming programmers. They are free to do it and have equal opportunity to do so by law. In fact, I know some, and am glad that they did it. If there are not as many women programmers as men programmers, its due to the fact that no as many women want to do it. If more woman would rather do something else than program than men, why force them to, let them do what they are most predisposed to. We should have the same standards and educational program for men and women, that way everyone has equal opportunity and is free to choose their field without some sort of barrier being set up. If you make things EASIER for one group what you do is you disadvantage another group by creating all sorts of benefits they cannot access. This is wrong. It is a sick, disturbed mentality that we should discourage people who WANT to program from doing so, to try to shoehorn people who are not inclined to program into doing that.
Part of what is going on is mentally ill liberals who are unwilling to let go of victimization and guilt complexes that seems to be such a part of the Liberal mental complex that they cannot live without it, even though for the most part their original grievances have long been properly addressed. This is why well after we have created extensive legal gaurantees for equal opportunity, it is never enough for these people, which is why their agenda becomes ever more insane and shrill, they ran out of legitimate causes long ago. The mentality is that they are addicted to conflict just for the sake of it, that they have to pick new fights, since the legitimate issues are gone, they have gone beserk now demanding retribution and discrimination of their own against men, white people, American citizens, etc. They are unwilling to let go of the victimization complex even though for the most part in reality it is long past, with decades of equal opportunity legislation. In the process they have become what they claim to be against, they have become monsters who are out for blood and who have a hatred of and a malicious intent against men, and in some cases what approaches genocidal ambitions, for demonized majority groups. You can see this behaviour everywhere, by creating controversies and crisis where there is none, such as in Ferguson, just to keep the conflict alive when its legitimate beef has long been addressed and laid to rest.
Another fact which relates to this and to H1B Visas, is that numerous studies have shown that there is NO IT labor shortage in the US and that in fact we have large numbers of American college graduates who cannot find jobs becuase these jobs are being stolen by the H1B Visas. The H1B program is about suppressing wages and trying to replace american computer programmers with foreigners, this will actually discourage ALL americans, Men and Women, from going through the trouble of the CS degree when they are constantly being undermined by the corporate cronies. Microsoft would love to pay CS people minimum wage if they could, all they are concerned about is profits and are willing to ruin the lives of American CS degree holders by pulling the rug out from under them. Its not only CS but its also the Medical field as well.
You have American doctors who did the right thing by taking on the debt to spend $100,000 on a medical degree only to have their wages suppressed to where they are pushed into poverty, making far too little after they pay their loans to make it all worth the trouble, by third world educated labor who spent 1/9th of what an American has to on a medical degree. I know doctors who have watched the profession and the reward for the effort for american graduates destroyed by the third world H1B visa labor, it is killing them, the third world labor is poorly educated and did not have to obtain the same level of training as an American medical student and yet they are given medical licenses and allowed to basically steal jobs right out from under better educated American doctors. Add to this the Obamacare nightmare