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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.
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).
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....
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.
The cynic in me says they just want to flood the market with cheap labor. The bottom on many other skilled trades has fallen out. They want a piece of the profit action. Why? Because they have to remain ever more profitable every Q.
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.
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.