Slashdot Mirror
Google: Poor Kids Might Grasp Macbeth If They Code Like Kids At $43K/Yr School
theodp writes: While the CollegeBoard warned against drawing a causal link between learning computer science and improved learning in other subjects, Google has no such qualms. "CS is much more than computer programming and coding," writes the Google for Education blog in a post announcing a new gateway for Google's CS education opportunities. "It's a gateway to creativity and innovation not just in technology but in fields as diverse as music, sports, the arts, and health." Among the technology showcased at the gateway is Pencil Code, a programming tool for beginning coders that Google boasts is already helping kids attending the $43K-a-year Beaver Country Day School to brush up their Shakespeare by having students create interactive chatbots that play the part of characters like Lady Macbeth. "After completing this code I knew more and understood more of the play," begins one student's featured testimonial. "It allowed me to interpret Macbeth in a new way that I had never thought of before. I really enjoyed using Pencil Code because it made coding simpler for me and helped me try something new." Elsewhere on its CS gateway, Google laments that a new Google-Gallup Research Study shows that 'Blacks and low-income are less likely to have access' to such computer science opportunities.
It's a gateway to creativity and innovation
I think you're thinking of calculus not computer science, the least scientific of all sciences.
I often find myself under-estimating children's abilities. In this case TFA child's programming, empathy and literature skills are impressive, but their ability to speak such fluent 'customer testimonial' at a young age is simply astounding.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I'd expect a simply better educational experience all around code or no code.
I don't doubt that learning to code can train a child to think logically and be creative, but I would put the increase of knowledge of the play down to merely spending more time with the play, rather than coding itself. The conclusion of the study seems to be very self-serving.
Only reason those big corporations are "worried" about how kids can learn to code is they need cheap labour.
If you help forcing kids to learn to code, you are only helping them to become the "poor factory worker" of the future.
If by some mistake, some /.'er actually have kids, best thing you can do is keep them away form PC as long as possible.
World is filled with socially awkward clowns.
All of these articles about CS lately confuse correlation with cause.
The simple fact of the matter is that kids who enjoy the "challenge" of programming are more likely to be logical, analytical thinkers than their peers, and are therefore likely to do better at all subjects that require those skills. Taking a CS course is not "causing" them to be better at those other subjects -- their ability is innate.
Forcing someone to take a class they neither enjoy nor are good at is not going to magically make them better students. It will expand their experience with different subjects, but it's not going to make them good at it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
We covered Macbeth at school when I was 14. I don't think I was particularly disadvantaged by covering it the old fashioned way; with a decent teacher who helped us over some of the linguistic bumps, covered key themes and character arcs and had us do rough-and-ready re-enactments of a few of the scenes to understand both the "flow" of Shakespeare's language and the pace and tone of the play. I struggle to understand how technology would have helped much above and beyond that.
We've had a flood of articles on the issue of "does learning to code make you better at learning other stuff" recently. I can't help but feel that the question itself isn't quite the right one (and that the wrong question might be getting a deliberate push by commercial interests).
If there is evidence to suggest that learning to code produces wider educational benefits, then I suspect that it is because coding is something that needs to be taught in a structured manner, with strong logical underpinnings. This is something that is missing from many subjects on the modern curriculum. Even mathematics is usually taught by rote these days, with students simply learning how to plug numbers into a formula in a mechanical manner.
Having recruited and managed a number of school and college leavers over the years, I've noticed that those whose education has included subjects with strong structural and logical underpinnings often tend to be more adaptable and faster to learn in the workplace. That can mean computer science and it can mean mathematics, but it's not limited to them. Ancient and non-Indo-European languages can be particularly good, as learning these requires engagement with the logical underpinnings of "how a language works". French/Spanish/German etc, unfortunately often tend to be taught using a "phrasebook" approach that might result in a faster route to a passable fluency (provided the conversation remains within comfortable bounds), but doesn't bring the same wider benefits.
Poor kids were "grasping" Macbeth before computers were invented. All it takes is a little motivation, you know, like wanting to get an education to get out of poverty. Being poor should be a great motivator. People who stay in poverty generation after generation should be ashamed.
I know because I was one of them. We were one of the poorest families in town. Yeah, there were computers back in the 50s and 60s, but no home computers.
So surprise, surprise, a company with a big stake in software finds the coding is the key subject. If this were being done in Nevada, the magic subject might be probability and statistics...
Why is Snark Required?
All those games were written by white people with European ancestry. Untermensch have never been involved.
Nice mixture of racism and social Darwinism you've managed to concoct there, but shouldn't you be off attending a Hitler Youth meeting or something?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Just another example of the classically American naive conceit that "poverty happens" to people randomly, like a strike of lightning from the blue, and not (mostly) from a series of really bad life choices, something which is plausibly heritable.
My point isn't that poor people can't enjoy Macbeth, but teaching them to code isn't going to make a person like something they didn't enjoy before,, either.
-Styopa
Why do I seem so many discussions lumping together blacks and low income? It's not that I'm offended, rather it's the logic. It's like people voting for thugs in the Democratic party because they believe in democracy! Of course voting Republican implies a never ending string of presidential misfits who's antics rival that of Wile E. Coyote.
I suppose if your going to raise a whole generation of inept programmers, a monstrosity like Google is the place to do it. In any case, a well educated black man is in high demand and would never consider working for a goofball company. Especially when he can make 10x more selling crack! amiright ?
maybe if google paid their taxes you wouldnt have this problem, you have to admire their chutzpa though,
they want to get involved in public education but dont want to pay for it at all,
meantime your schools have to beg for pencils http://www.donorschoose.org/
you should be running them out of all education/government contracts
"Do I detect envy and resentment, 'murkin ape? When you're through bible-thumping, I suggest you take a long hard look at all the achievements your mongrel race-inhabited country takes credit for and which were only made possible by Europeans. We're superior, accept it."
I use to think the worst aspect of this article was the crammed in socialism jab towards Google at the very end until I read your comment.
Kids don't accomplish a lot and understand a lot, because they learn how to code.
They learn how to code, because they are the type of kids who would have the patience and curiosity and drive to learn how to code.
And that same mindset also makes them the same kind who would pursue other avenues of knowledge.
My dog isn't a dog because he eats bones and licks his nuts. He licks his nuts and eats bones, because he's a dog.
I have been in the tech field for almost 4 decades, having done software, hardware, firmware, and embedded, using languages ranged from machine language to asm to C, from Cobol to Fortran to Pascal to PL/1 played with machines larger than a concert hall down to the teeny tiny disposable RF chips ...
Yes, I have done all that but still I can't grasp Macbeth
Every single time I picked up the book I fell asleep
Every single time I watch movies / plays of Macbeth my mind just drifted to, I think, the 7th dimension
So what the fuck is so hot about grasping that "to be or not tobe" thingy?
I mean, many of the things that I have done, for the past 40 years or so, are still running somewhere (from coffee machine to drive trains powering vehicles, from codes running on mainframe to embedded code), without Macbeth I still contribute my bit to the world
They can take that Macbeth bit and stuff it up where the sun never shine and I won't even give a damn
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/s...
Eh, what?
I'm a Buddhist, and I live in Sweden.
Care to try again?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Then don't appeal to genetics to make your case for what's obviously a social and cultural issue.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Because Arabs and Orientals had NO accomplishments for 1000 of years.
"by having students create interactive chatbots that play the part of characters like Lady Macbeth"
To give it it's due, maybe in a textual analysis, post -modern kind of way there's some small element of truth to this.
To effectively write a chatbot you need to be able to distinguish words and phrases a character would use. That would involve WHY the character might use those words or phrases and so a discussion of the character's world view ad understanding of themselves would be faciliated.
That type of fine-grained, textual over-analysis is certainly nothing Shakespeare engaged in and nothing he though his audience would engage in and nothing he thought anyne needed to engage in order to deeply understand his the themes of his plays, that is to "get" them.
It's a product of academics who want to make a living talking about Shakespeare, many of whom have a high degree opf autisitic spectrum disorder thinking.
What you need to understand Shakespeare is life experience: the experience of long-form tragedies, of the triumph of resignation over action, of futility and the crashing of hubris. This is often, but not always, just what young people don't have. As a group, they tend to be more forwarding looking and hopeful for the future.
So here's a bunch of Googlers- a group which skews heavily towards autistic spectrum disorder - using Shakespeare's plays as a pretext to indulge their preferred activity.
It's like the blind leading the blind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
education should be a thing of the state
Kids were grasping Macbeth before there were computers to program.
Sure, if you build your own study aid you learn the material. That doesn't mean programming makes you better, smarter, or more fucking capable of grasping Macbeth.
It means that with high quality teaching, in small classes with dedicates teachers who know their stuff, and for students who have the benefits of wealthy parents and a decent breakfast ... and all of the other benefits kids who go to an expensive private school have ... that education actually works.
This is complete and utter crap. It's not evidence programming teaches Macbeth, it's evidence that wealthy kids in really good schools do better because it's a higher quality of education.
It ignores home life, single parent families, neighborhoods where you have to worry about getting shot, and pretty much everything kids with fewer advantages in life have to deal with.
I am so damned sick of listening to a bunch of rich white guys telling us how education will be improved if kids learn to code.
Put your money where your mouth is, and fund some really damned high quality education for a bunch of poor kids, and while you're at it give them some of the other benefits kids who aren't poor have.
And while you're at it, make the spoiled little rich kids live in poverty as a control. Then you can talk about causation.
Until then, this boils down to "kids whose parents can send them to expensive private schools have many benefits in life which aren't enjoyed by poor kids".
You can't take one of those advantages in isolation and claim it's fucking magic.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There you go again, argue against the reality
We were kids from the *SAME* crime ridden neighborhood, for crying out loud !
Whether it be a black kid, a hispanic kid, a white kid or an asian kid, we had to endure the gangs, the drugs, and all the shits that came at our face each and every single fucking day - in other word, the "social" thing was the same for all of us who lived there
Cultural? Whoa, my man, watch out !!
Are you inferring that somehow the blacks and the latinos are 'inferior' in term of 'culture', compare to the whites and the asians???
The fact they had to listen to their bots to test them must have some effect on their knowledge of the play. Perhaps the same might be said of just reading the play aloud probably would have the same effect?
I'm on a four-month dry spell. FML. :-(
if they didn't go home to an over stressed and overworked parent (singular, since it's hard to keep a Marriage together when you're poor), didn't suffer from food insecurity (it's coming back in the South & Rust belt) and didn't have 40+ kids in their class.
Naw, Google's right. We just need more coders (which will coincidentally reduce the value of software programming skills, who knew?)
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Teach kids to code by writing applications that do something Liberal-Artsy - whoa, they just learned two things at once!
All this for only >$40K - wow, if only public schools could emulate this amazing technique.
Pfffft.
Create an app that echos back lines from the play when you feed it another line. You can learn so much about the play from that.
Here's an idea. How about using the money to get a proper teacher instead of a babysitter and actually learn about the play, what things might mean in it, what Scotland was like during the time it was set in, and even about Shakespeare's time and life and how it would impact his writing. Get an inspiring teacher and the students would learn much more. When I studied plays for the most part we just went around the room and took turns reading a few lines. There was a bit of discussion about what things might mean but not much. For the most part it was very boring.
It couldn't be that Google would like (future) access to coders that would be willing to work for less than what rich kids would expect to make?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
You get the benefit of knowing people who have/come from money. "All things being equal, give them opportunities and teach them, and they'll just get better."
Things are not equal, and honestly I am not asking for them to be. Equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
My parents are married...oh you mean to each other... no way... I don't want to be a minority. Besides, they really hate each other.
they wouldn't be poor kids ;)
In the part of the country I live in, if you are grossing $43k a year you are living reasonably well.
If you can afford to spend $43k a year for your child's education, I don't think you need to worry about them understanding Macbeth or coding of just about anything else for that matter.
If you just put that $43k a year into a savings account, your child would practically be a millionaire by the time they turned 21.
For the love of all that is unholy, why is Google helping kids who attend a $43k a year school?!?
Wait, how interactive? Because, you know, Macbeth ain't alls well that ends well...
They have the summer off.
We now know that CS education is worse for minority students than for more fortunate students just like all other areas of education. Unreasonable distribution of wealth does cause social strife and ultimately things like revolutions and a lot of violent crime, drug and alcohol addiction etc.. So the real answer is that if we really want poor students to do well we have to redistribute wealth so that the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor are much closer together economically. Gosh and gee whiz, who would ever have thought that socialism had any serious advantages?
A paper SUBMITTED for peer review almost 20 years ago. Presumably never actually published or we wouldn't get a 20 year old preview copy eh?
Quick review seems to be a bunch of gobblygook trying to redefine "talent" and try and convince us that the fact that it is 10 times easier to teach me math than my sister is irrelevent.
Sure, even I learned to play an instrument but i was never gonna be the soloist. After 10 years I was technically proficient but never very 'pretty'. Yet our lead could pick up anything by ear and make it sound the same or better. If that's not a talent, you can teach me to play by ear, right? Not happening.
So, you're saying that exposing kids to the works of Shakespeare makes them better able to understand it? And that more and more interactive exposure yields corresponding increases in that understanding? Wow. Who knew? So where's your proof that it's computer programming that was the key factor here. Hmm?
I challenge Google to reach out to the Rock Scissors Paper Collective of Oakland, to create a programming initiative for low income and minority students in Oakland. RPS has a proven track record and they are currently looking for a new location in Oakland, which is perfect time to establish a new program in their own backyard. They are active and deeply tied into the community, and supportive of ideas like this.
I was animating sprites on an Amstrad CPC664 to re-enact the Macbeth scene "is this a dagger I see before me?". Got extra credit for it too. Kids don't need stinking expensive schools to do this stuff.
Do we really need more kids to learn to code? I mean, can't we just get robots to do that for us?