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San Francisco Public Schools To Require Computer Science For Preschoolers
theodp writes: Never underestimate the ability of tech and its leaders to create a crisis. The S.F. Chronicle's Jill Tucker reports that the San Francisco School Board unanimously voted Tuesday to ensure every student in the district gets a computer science education, with coursework offered in every grade from preschool through high school, a first for a public school district. Tech companies, including Salesforce.com, as well as foundations and community groups, are expected to pitch in funding and other technical support to create the new coursework, equip schools and train staff to teach it. From Resolution No. 155-26A2 (PDF), In Support of Expanding Computer Science and Digital Learning to All Students at All Schools from Pre-K to 12th Grade: 1. "All students are capable of making sense of computer science in ways that are creative, interactive, and relevant." 2. "All students, from pre-K to 12, deserve access to rigorous and culturally meaningful computer science education and should be held to high expectations for interacting with the curriculum." 3. "Students' access to and achievement in computer science must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs." MissionLocal has a two-page SFUSD flyer on the project, which aims to illustrate the "importance of computer science" with the same Code.org jobs infographic that Microsoft used to help achieve its stated goal of creating a national K-12 CS crisis, and demonstrate "disparities in accessing CS education" for SFUSD's 57,000 students with a small-sample-size-be-damned bar chart of the racial demographics of the school district's 209 AP Computer Science participants (181 Asian, 0 African American, 6 Latino, 1 Native American, 14 White, 7 Other).
I don't understand why it's all about coding. They would do the world a great service if they would teach early students computer science concepts such as: Combinations and permutations, Probability theory, Set Theory, Analysis of algorithms, Symbolic logic, basic proofs in symbolic logic.
They should keep the questions they ask students simple and involve engagement of the brain always presenting novel problems, rather than emphasizing rote, such as ability to solve practiced problems of a standard form for a time-limited testing session.
Plus confine the nature of tests to questions about theory/background, and limit problems on exams to trivial "Toy" problems that can be worked out mentally in less than 1 minute.
IOW: Evaluation primarily based on submitting assignments, class participation, and participation in group projects measured by the examiner inspecting the development documents and reviewing which tickets were assigned to which student, And what code each student committed.
Just teaching coding.... the average student will need half a semester, before they can successfully write "Hello World"
They might be capable of implementing FizzBuzz on their own after a few years.
BUT they may seriously inspire people or help spark interest in the field, so even if the courses are useless to 80% of the students...... I think it really is worth it to society to require that everyone being schooled has a taste of programming, And that the taste they get is Not biased towards the negative; in other words, the classes should be given in a digestible manner, still with a challenge, but tasks kept simple enough to avoid scaring people away.