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Microsoft Brings Its Embrace-Extend-Extinguish Game To K-12 Schools?
theodp writes: A year after it paid $2.5 billion to buy Minecraft, Microsoft has announced a partnership with Code.org that makes a Minecraft-themed introduction to programming a signature tutorial of this year's Hour of Code, which hopes to reach 200 million schoolchildren next month in what the Microsoft-funded nonprofit is billing as the largest learning event in history. "A core part of our mission to empower every person on the planet is equipping youth with computational thinking and problem-solving skills to succeed in an increasingly digital world," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a press release, which also notes that "Microsoft is gifting Windows Store credit to every educator who organizes an Hour of Code event worldwide." Of the Minecraft tutorial, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi gushed, "Compared to what you would otherwise be doing for school, this is, like, the best thing ever."
Where's the embrace and extinguish?
Agile Artisans
One can teach critical thinking without any reference to computers or programming. Teach that and computers will follow like wet follows rain. Teach it using 'computers' and the kids will have no idea what they are doing.
Last time I looked Apple was constantly offering discounted iPads and apple products to lock schools and minds into the apple ecosystem.
Last time I looked Google was constantly offering discounted chromebooks and pushing schools into the google ecosystem, especially with gmail and google docs.
I'm sick and tired of the Microsoft is evil crap. Yes, 20 years ago they tried to embrace, extend and extinguish their standards over open standards to the entire internet. But they didn't win. The average consumer is not a microsoft consumer, they are a Apple or Google consumer.
So what did Microsoft do? They determined their core market was Office and Servers (through azure). Everything they've done over the past few years has been geared towards furthering those goals. Windows 10 is mostly a ploy to put those two platforms first, in the same way Google and Apple serve to put their platforms first.
But you know what's different? Microsoft is more open than they've ever been, ever. Heck, their Azure cloud service even has first rate support for running your favorite flavor of linux on their servers. They've open sourced much of their codebase for C# and have been focused on allowing their system to write code for themselves and any of their competitors.
Of course they are going to lean towards supporting their own systems and will make changes to the root of the product to enhance their other offerings. They are a for-profit corporation, just like Google and Apple. But they've been far more open and less heavy handed than those two in the last 5 years.
More headline trolling details: Amazon & iTunes credits are given to teachers too as the link above states in the freaking post timothy made. But sure, go ahead and bash microsoft for putting money into a program that is trying to teach using a tool that is extremely popular among the very population that you are targeting.
Hey, back in the day you could buy votes for a drink! Perhaps more effective than the $10 prizes though, is the $500,000 in prizes Code.org dangles to entice schools to get with the program(ming), or (in the past), the $750 gift codes Code.org offered to teachers who got their students to code (with $250 more for teachers of girls).
Not that it has anything to do with the Minecraft lessons being designated a signature Hour of Code tutorial, at least according to the evaluation criteria below, but Code.org's biggest donors coincidentally include Microsoft ($3M+), Ballmer Family Giving ($3M+), and Bill Gates ($1M+). And Code.org's CEO, who once reported to Satya Nadella, is coincidentally a sometimes jogging partner of Steve Ballmer, as well as the next-door neighbor of Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith.
Hour of Code: How tutorials will be evaluated for inclusion:
Tutorials will be listed higher if they are:
high quality
designed for beginners - among students AND teachers
designed as a ~ 1 hour activity
require no sign up
require no payment
require no installation
work across many OS/device platforms, including mobile and tablets
work across multiple languages
promote learning by all demographic groups (esp. under-represented groups)
not pure HTML+CSS web design focus - (our goal is computer science, not just HTML coding)
At best it exposes a bit of coding to kids. At worst, it turns them off completely.
However, even writing a damn "Hello World" takes hours if a novice has to do it with some support. Much more if there is no hand holding involved. I have seen adults struggle to find the matching closing quote problem. I had to fight with a problem because I typed code in with MS-Word, which used the slanted quotes, which gave me some weird error, something along the lines of incorrect encoding.
Listen, if your job is threatened by school children coding in Scratch I don't know what you've been doing for the last few years, but it certainly doesn't involve making smart career moves.
It's the other way around - Math and critical thinking help in programming.
Wondering how you come to the conclusion of a flooded job market. Oh right, it's the hyperbole train.
Better than giving nerds wedgies? I don't think so.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What a great idea. Let's make programming dull as shit so they immediately lose interest in it!