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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.
No one is forcing anyone. If you read the summary you would know it simply is a required offering. Not mandatory.
While this opportunity will not much effect the future of most Arkansan students, there will be some individual talents discovered that would've otherwise been overlooked.
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In germany Computer Science is a topic in "high school" since 30 years.
Actually I belonged to the first class in my federate state who took it.
Or do you mean with "mandatory" that it is mandatory for pupils? If so: that is retarded.
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... when the problem is corporate greed that supports CEOs and shareholders.
The middle class is collapsing and it's in a panic. They know where the money is going and they want to prepare their kids so they will be able to play on that turf.
There's no money in coding and, only a tiny percentage of kids have a natural aptitude for it.
The money grab supported by Congress, PACs, Big Business, and SCOTUS has reached a critical mass where there are two layers to American society:
1.) The haves
3.) The have-nots
There are no realistic cures, either ... certainly not teaching children to code.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It teaches basic understanding of computer logic and how computers work in general. Most people have no clue. People should be more than just their jobs. A well rounded education is nice for some to have.
If you're lucky, talented and well educated there's money in just about _anything_.
At any rate I'm sure there's money in programming, because we wouldn't have so many businessman pushing people into it otherwise. If you see an education push into a field you can pretty much bet the reason is that somebody is tired of having to pay decent wages. The rich get supply and demand. I wish the working class did...
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Teaching high school students to code isn't going to result in disastrously bad coders any more than high school chemistry and physics lessons result in bad scientists. If people in this day and age are still hiring coders without actually verifying their skills and qualifications, then they deserve all the bad coders they get.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
... do some other things first. Arkansas is ranked 44.
So your point is that instead of improving their schools, they should focus on improving their schools?
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 ability to write computer programs is mostly useless, outside actually writing computer programs.
Nonsense. Learning computer programming teaches students to think logically and systematically, and you can't fake it, because your program either works or it doesn't. I know programming, and I know calculus. Knowing programming is about a thousand times more useful. If high schools teach calculus, they certainly should teach programming, at least as an elective.
Saying "coding" instead of "programming" is like saying "ciphering" instead of "mathematics". Please stop. Imaging the headline, "Arkansas is now the first state to require that high schools teach ciphering". I'm not a computer programmer, but I think you guys are disrespecting your discipline by encouraging the word "coding".