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Arkansas Is Now the First State To Require That High Schools Teach Coding
SternisheFan writes Arkansas will be implementing a new law that requires public high schools to offer classes in computer science starting in the 2015-16 school year. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who signed the bill, believes it will provide "a workforce that's sure to attract businesses and jobs" to the state. $5 million of the governor's proposed budget will go towards this new program. For the districts incapable of of administering these classes due to lack of space or qualified teachers, the law has provisions for online courses to be offered through Virtual Arkansas. Although students will not be required to take computer science classes, the governor's goal is to give students the opportunity if they "want to take it." Presently, only one in 10 schools nationwide offer computer science classes. Not only will Arkansas teach these classes in every public high school and charter school serving upper grades, the courses will count towards the state's math graduation requirement as a further incentive for students. Training programs for teacher preparation will be available, but with the majority of the infrastructure already primed, the execution of this new law should hopefully be painless and seamless.
Maybe to get into those classes you need pre reqs... Like math...
An introductory programming class does not require more than grade school math. My local elementary school teaches programming to 4th graders using Scratch. 90% of them "get it" with little difficulty. They understand loops, conditionals, subroutines, etc. After a few weeks most of them can design an algorithm to say, draw a pentagram, or find the 1000th prime number.
The problem is that these are two separate jobs that should be done by separate people. Computer Science (theory) people are the one who develop architecture or new paradigms or languages. Once these new things exist, it's programmers who make them useful.
It's a symbiosis, not a competition.