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Australia's Prime Minister Doesn't Get Why Kids Should Learn To Code
New submitter Gob Gob writes: The Prime Minister of Australia has come out and ridiculed an opposition policy aimed at teaching kids to code. In response to the leader of the Labor Party's question about whether he would commit to supporting Labor's push to have coding taught in every primary school in Australia, the Prime Minister said: "He said that he wants primary school kids to be taught coding so they can get the jobs of the future. Does he want to send them all out to work at the age of 11? Is that what he wants to do? Seriously?"
doesn't get a few things, like digging 60M tonnes of coal from central Queensland might be a) bad for the Great Barrier Reef (because of the port infrastructure needed) and b) bad for CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and C) bad for Australia because we will pay for infrastructure for these projects to go ahead. He is typical of conservative politics in Australia - I hope his great grand-children forgive him.
He's the PM who wanted to scrap the National Broadband Network and thought more roads was what Australia needed. He obviously doesn't get information technology at all.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Computers are pretty integral to modern learning. At the very least, kids nowadays need to be able to use a computer just like they need to know how to wield a pencil. As far as basics... computer programming is an excellent real-world opportunity to put basic skills to practical use, especially logic and math.
BTW, you call chemistry "basic"? Why is chemistry of any practical use to anyone but anyone but a chemist? I can't recall a single instance in my life when I had to apply any sort of chemistry-based knowledge. Let's apply that same logic to computer programming. How often are these kids going to be interacting with computers in their lifetimes? Might it not be handy to understand how those computers work, and perhaps even know how to write scripts to automate tasks, for instance? Which of the two knowledge or skill sets (programming or chemistry) is more likely to have a direct impact on these kids lives?
TL;DR version: nowadays, computers ARE fundamental.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The point of teaching computer programming is not to make every child a computer programmer any more than the point of a biology class is to make every child into a biologist.
I thought the point of biology class was to turn every child into a bit of a biologist, just as a programming class will turn them into a bit of a programmer ... just as I am a bit of a cook, even though I'm a pretty bad one and I don't work in a restaurant. This idea that there are "biologists" who dedicate their lives to it and everyone else is a "non-biologist" just promulgates both elitism on the one hand and ignorance on the other. Same goes for programming. You may never write an application in your life, but being a bit of a programmer is going to help you the first time you need to, say, formulate a complex Google query.