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Should We Really Try To Teach Everyone To Code?
theodp writes: Gottfried Sehringer asks Should We Really Try to Teach Everyone to Code? He writes, "While everyone today needs to be an app developer, is learning to code really the answer? Henry Ford said that, 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' I view everyone learning to code as app development's version of a faster horse. What we all really want — and need — is a car. The industry is falling back on code because for most people, it's the only thing they know. If you want to build an application, you have to code it. And if you want to build more apps, then you have to teach more people how to code, right? Instead, shouldn't we be asking whether coding is really the best way to build apps in the first place? Sure, code will always have a place in the world, but is it the language for the masses? Is it what we should be teaching everyone, including our kids?" President Obama thinks so, telling Re/code at Friday's Cyber Security Summit that 'everybody's got to learn to code early' (video). But until domestic girls (including his daughters) and underrepresented groups get with the program(ming), the President explained he's pushing tech immigration reform hard and using executive action to help address tech's "urgent need" for global talent.
It needs not to be with the expectation that everybody will become an app developer.
Learning to code provides a person with an opportunity to develop a better understanding of
1. How a sequence of operations is constructed
2. How logic is part of the decision making process
3. How to approach problems in an organized fashion
4. How to communicate, describe and document ideas
5. How to work with others in a collaborative environment
My business (https://www/mimetics.ca) uses robots to teach programming, but it's important to note that not everyone will become a programmer (or develop applications for robots) but the skills learned by creating simple applications are applicable in life and will help then in a multitude of other pursuits.
Saying that people should learn to code because at some point they will probably will have to program an app is counter-productive and will probably create some very negative perceptions about it. Teaching people (kids) programming as a way to develop the soft skills above and give them a taste of it so they can decide whether or not to pursue it as a career is much more effective and positive.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I work with physicians. They quite often have to look things up in databases - patient records, imaging, test results, etc. Simple SQL queries would let them find exactly what they're looking for. Since they can't do that, they have to use a basic search interface somebody made (which they paid an arm and a leg for) and then look through individual records. Even more painful is watching them collect charts for some purpose. A simple script with a little SQL would do nicely, but instead the job is so painful they usually hire someone to sift through everything. That someone invariably can't write the simple script either, so does the whole thing by hand.
Similarly, our research coordinator needs things like lists of patients with missing data. Compiling that is a two line Python program (I did it for her once) or a day of clicking. Guess which she has to do?
I have a friend who's a due diligence type accountant. Her job is to sift through accounting records looking for stuff. There are some programs for doing that kind of thing, but only if the data happens to be in the right format. So she spends a lot of time wading through things by hand. The ability to write simple scripts wouldn't make the job automatic, but it would help a lot in searching and organizing.
I know a secretary who is supposed to keep the boss's CV in order. She has to take new publications and enter them on a couple of web pages and End Note. The citation records themselves are online and easily accessible. If she could write some basic code it would be pretty much automatic, but instead she just types them all by hand, repeatedly.
A friend of mine wants to make a webpage with some photos. She doesn't want anything complicated, and most of it can be done with existing open source stuff, but she wants a couple of custom tweaks. She can't do that. Actually, she can't even do the setup for the site, because she can't follow a bit of basic HTML or tweak some javascript.
There's an immense amount of busywork that gets done because people can't write a bit of special purpose code for themselves. Not to mention the problems caused by people who don't possess the logic or problem solving skills that they'd pick up in an intro coding class.