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K12CS.org: Microsoft, Google, Apple Identifying What 1st Graders Should Know
theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons declared computer coding class the nation's latest educational fad (script). Proving Principal Skinner's point, K12CS.org on Thursday announced a New Framework to Define K-12 Computer Science Education, the collaboration of participants from a number of states (MD, CA, IN, IA, AR, UT, ID, NE, GA, WA), large school districts (NYC, Chicago, San Francisco), technology companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple), organizations (Code.org, ACM, CSTA, ISTE, MassCAN, CSNYC), and individuals (higher ed faculty, researchers, K-12 teachers, and administrators). "A steering committee initially comprised of the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and [tech bankrolled and led] Code.org will oversee this project," explained a CSTA blog post. "Funding for the project will be provided by Code.org and the ACM. The framework will identify key K-12 computer science concepts and practices we expect students exiting grades 2, 5, 8, and 12 to know."
In a FAQ, K12CS.org envisions a Programming and Algorithms standard for 1st Graders that calls for the 5-year-olds to "Work collaboratively in clear roles (e.g., pair programming) to construct a problem solution of a sequence of block-based programming commands." A day before the announcement, Politico reported that K-12 CS education is expected to get a State of the Union mention this year, and that the White House and U.S. Dept. of Education have been trolling for CS success stories in conjunction with the announcement of a broad set of new commitments to CS Education in early 2016.
In a FAQ, K12CS.org envisions a Programming and Algorithms standard for 1st Graders that calls for the 5-year-olds to "Work collaboratively in clear roles (e.g., pair programming) to construct a problem solution of a sequence of block-based programming commands." A day before the announcement, Politico reported that K-12 CS education is expected to get a State of the Union mention this year, and that the White House and U.S. Dept. of Education have been trolling for CS success stories in conjunction with the announcement of a broad set of new commitments to CS Education in early 2016.
This isn't "computer science." This is assembly-line work.
How likely is it that 20 or 30 years from now humans will even think of programming. Computers are the perfect programmers not people. We just need to get the computers started and stand back.
People need to supply the human imagination. Children up to about the age of 7 should be allowed to develop their imagination while the brain is most plastic to it. Later they can strengthen their use of rules and cold discipline and control when they become older and more cynical.
of education and curriculum development, especially at k-12 level.
First graders barely know addition and subtraction. They should be learning basic things like reading.
Now I just want to homeschool the kids (that I hope, in vain, one day to have) and teach them basics so that they will, like one-eyed men among the blind, know how to read and write and do math in their heads like Americans used to, or like the Indians to whom our jobs get outsourced.
The earlier we can start training our kids to be good little workers, the better it will be for our companies. Fuck letting kids be kids, we need them to be productive little producers. My only problem with this initiative is we aren't sufficiently exploring options to start training the little buggers while they are in the womb.
Not everyone needs to know how to code. What everyone does need to understand is information. How do I find the information I need to solve a problem? How do I discern the quality of that information? I'm I looking at different information or multiple views of the same information. How does visualizing information in different ways help us solve problems.
How dare someone try to teach something useful to our children? Like collaboration on problem solving tasks? This is a terrible precedent! Don't they know that such education should be limited to the existing technical elite and jealously guarded so we can protect our jobs?
Dress your child up like an adult and make them do adult things....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Why don't we let experts on education tell us what children need to know, instead of multinational corporations telling us what they want kids to know for their own personally tailored "workforce of the future"?
These kids are being set up to be wage slaves which serve the interests of the companies.
I sincerely doubt any of these companies truly gives a fuck about the future of these kids.
Five year olds don't need to learn "pair programming".
So much self-serving bullshit which has nothing at all to do with educating children.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
3 dinosaurs whose best days are behind them.
I have my serious doubt that this will really wind up helping many kids.
I've watched our own kids grow up around computers, tablets, smartphones, Chromebooks issued in class, etc. etc. And even though they do enjoy learning and mastering the interactive games that let you "build worlds" (like Minecraft or the Little Big Planet series on the Playstation), none of this has motivated them to learn to code.
I feel like there's some pressure on them to develop programming skills because "If you play Minecraft, it teaches some of the basics already!" (and there's always SOME teacher out there trying to use it as a launching platform into some other subject he/she wants to teach). But really, I think they just like interactively creating things to show off to their friends they chat with in the game.
I remember back when I first discovered computers as a kid and was completely hooked on them. It was SO different back then. The computer you bought basically sat there and did nothing but produce a blinking cursor on your TV screen and expected you to start programming something into it. Sure, you could buy some pre-packaged programs (and we did), but the owner's manual was a complete guide to programming in BASIC on the system -- not just a quick reference on how to plug it in, hook up all of the connections, and a rundown of what each button or switch did on the case.
I had lots of fun as a kid just keying in programs out of books or magazines and trying to get them to run properly.
Today's computer experience is pretty vastly removed from that, yet I think some of us are puzzled as to why the kids don't take up coding more often, despite "growing up around computers" and using them since they're old enough to move a mouse.
It's great to offer kids the OPTION to learn this stuff if they take an interest in it. But adding programming to a basic school curriculum may be a mistake.
The very same corporations that spent 40 years insisting we didnt need to code, didnt need to understand, and could subsist through blind consumer lust are reaping the rewards of a sustained campaign to maximize short term profit at the expense of corporate sustainability.
to rephrase, Johnny cant code because Sony, Microsoft, and a wealth of other conglomerates told him he didnt need to. The product would "just work" in the words of Steve Jobs, and in the spirit of the DMCA is was heresy to disassemble, to hack, to question the nature of that great gift that had been bestowed upon him by so many corporate cloistered elite. Step back 20 more years and antithetic culture to nerds and science in the United states ensured even remote interests were extinguished in favour of sportsball, gender-enforced labour roles, and the empty promise of a working class labor market. Corporations are waking up a day late and a dollar short to the party where a six-figure class of non-disposable labor is beginning to not only act as a serious liability, but a serious long term threat to the profitability of labor reforms ushered in during the carter and reagan administration.
you dont just backflip out of this in a decade with code.org and a hard fast pelvic thrust into the public education system. Charter schools have ensured little Johnny puts more thought into matching his uniform and cleaning his shoes to avoid meaningless conformist regimen than the arithmetic thats thrown at him daily by a wageslave instructor fudging test scores to save his job for another year and make it to some form of retirement. You get out of this in the long term. another 40 years of eschewing stereotypes and building the foundation of good education through building blocks you've torn down for short-term goose to the stakeholders wealth. You fund schools, stop trying to malnurish them with definitions of a tomato as a vegetable on pizza and you repeal the DMCA. whats more, you make sure that the fist school that attempts to railroad a bright young child with an electronics project into prison for terrorism gets the brunt of your reformist policies. You stop funding the political shills in local government that push this kind of FUD and you take it on the chin come tax time. Because if you dont, in another 40 years anyone who likes to code and hack isnt working for you, theyre working on their emigration plan.
Good people go to bed earlier.
hit the books, kids! better learn that C# / Swift which will probably be replaced by 4-5 different languages by the time you escape college.
I learned BASIC at age 12. At age 20, the choices were BASIC, Cobol, and C. Total fads, 30 years later.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Study systems. SQ3R is *the* study system; SQW3R, PQRST, and other study systems all use synonyms for SQ3R concepts (Survey/Preview, Question, Read, (Self/)Recite, Review/Test). We tell kids to "study" but not how to study. We tell them to take notes, but we don't teach them about organization and its role in memory; we don't give them Affinity Diagrams or other tools to categorize large amounts of related but different information. The most students get are Venn diagrams to compare information.
The science of expertise. Deliberate practice. Skills and knowledge are refined by identifying your technical weakness in detail and targeting it. We give kids blanket homework--a sheet of mathematics problems; we don't teach kids to identify their weakness in mathematics (e.g. certain types of multiplication problems) and focus their study time on that. We *clog* their study time with useless shit; they quickly and correctly answer the things they know and get marks down on the things they don't, but it's good enough and they need not improve. We actively discourage improvement in this way.
Mnemonics. Human memory is so intimately familiar to human life you can explain deep, complex, technical concepts of associative and visual memory to first graders and they'll get it. Short-term memory, long-term memory, visualization of concrete concepts (like apples, chairs), lower coherence of abstract concepts (like hunger, happiness), spatial reasoning, associative storage. Even a first-grade child can look inside their own mind and go, "Oh, I see that!" You can readily teach them to apply rhythm and rhyme, fixation of visual images, and mnemonic systems like linking, storytelling, and mind palaces.
Mental mathematics. Another specific skill like mnemonics, with less-broad application. Arithmetic should not be a point of distress for students; we should teach them up through Geometry in absolute competence, and a strong arithmetic foundation is key to success in this endeavor. Instead we teach them to count on their fingers and carry single-digit overflow. How many people see 7 + 9 and immediately think 8, because 7-1? 6 + 7 and immediately think 3, because 6 - 3? 18, 13, didn't even do the math; I have all the number pairs on 5 and 10 (both ways) memorized, and have seen all the combinations enough times to immediately recognize them. I accumulate a carry appropriately. 12 years of school only taught me to use one method of iterative addition, not the fast method of immediate registration in single-cycle addition.
With these skills, students learn to learn. They encounter information they cannot take in and they convert it into something they can process. They encounter difficulty in their studies and they identify and correct their specific weaknesses. They gain an advantage against certain types of studies by domain-specific theoretical skills--mental mathematics and algebraic simplification for math; linguistic grammar for foreign languages (one of the possible explanations for Esperanto's perceived propaedeutic properties); music theory for music; visual art theories for visual art.
A student who understands study methods and the practice of deliberate practice has an immediate advantage in *everything*. This is a person who can rapidly learn to program *correctly*, not just fumble around for a result or perform by rote to satisfy a teacher. This is a person who can learn nuclear physics. This is a person who's 12 years old and already figured out how to model space shuttle re-entries on his computer because he likes space ships and is a giant nerd and spent 6 months studying that sort of thing and learned Python.
They call us geniuses; they don't realize it's only technique. It's a trade secret, not a genetic supermind.
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I am currently trying to get an 8 year old to complete hour of code classes. The classes are pretty good, with animated characters and concepts of functions, conditions and so on. But she has just barely enough patience and formal thinking to finish exercises with my help. If I am not around, she just starts randomly twiddling with blocks and gets frustrated that nothing works.
Now, some 5 year olds may be unusually good at this. But to teach this in classroom environment, with kids of different abilities and one instructor per 20 or more children, you probably need to wait till 4th grade at the earliest. Might be able to have one or two introductory classes to whet the appetite earlier, but not expect to get very far with it. Better to focus on basics like math.
Admiral Gial Ackbar said: It's a trap !!!!!
what about in 20 years K-12 student loans
Closed fist is a zero. Raised middle finger is a one.
They expect 5 year olds to code collaboratively with other 5 year olds?
I guess once you stop them from eating Playdoh you can do whatever you want.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
I was just read an article about the demise of Common Core. Many tech titans enthusiastically promoted Common Core as good for education and good for future employees. But the political right opposes this as big government and because it is an idea of the current president. The article said that Bill Gates has gone as far to to meet with Charles Koch to see if they find any common ground fora joint education initiative. The result of the dinner was not reported.
This initiative sounds like another proposal along similar lines that could die in the political culture wars.
The Simpsons is still airing?
Seriously, WTF? Kids need to learn building blocks of knowledge like math, science, literature, history (real history, not the Texas School Board's biblical version), and basic social skills.
I smell a black flag operation by the usual suspects to promote H-1n and dodge taxes.
"Just works" implies that what the system or device does do, it does fairly consistently.
That does NOT mean there is not room for it to do more, it does not mean that it does everything you want it to.
I don't see why supposedly technical Slashdotters are so up in arms about kids being sought an important skill that helps them do something THEY want to do, not what the device can do out of the box.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They should allow their own devices to be programmed first. A lot of families today only have a phone and a tablet and no other devices. If those are locked down to only play candy crush, what hope is there for kids to learn?
Why don't we let experts on education tell us what children need to know
Because without exception those "experts" have failed children and society for many decades now.
They are the ones producing coddled children than cannot even handle free speech any longer.
These kids are being set up to be wage slaves which serve the interests of the companies.
How are such children not the ultimate wage slaves? They can only live the rest of their lives in a padded box. Indeed, for the last few decades school has been nothing but a factory to destroy human minds and produce slaves of the state and corporations....
Five year olds don't need to learn "pair programming".
That part is a little odd for me to, but if you think about it that makes more sense for kids even than adults, because kids need to be taught to play with each other kindly... I don't see why pair programing would not help that.
As far as being "wage slaves" I don't see ANY education today that can help you escape the traditional corporate job better than learning to program. If you can program well it opens up a vast range of possibility for your future, from running your own company that makes choices based on a sound understanding of tech, to being a consultant who selects their own hours, clients and working conditions.
Sure you can ALSO be a wage slave if you learn to program but that's true of pretty much any skill you learn, like writing/reading.... are you advocating we stop teaching those also because they are tools of the corporate overlords? Instead realize that programing is a valuable skill that truly can help someone.
What I am not at all sure about is how many people really "take" to programming but I say we should at least try to teach everyone and see what the true percentages are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is basically just working with legos or blocks and being able to do simple conditions. Collaboration on something like this seems like a healthy exercise for young kids. Probably better than a lot of the rote learning they are stuck with typically in school. IMO we need more of this type of activity along with classic logic and rhetoric exercises.
These companies are either deluded, or a bunch of crooks. If they really believe that EVERYBODY should think that computer programming is as essential and exciting as they think, they are deluded. Chances are that the vast majority out there are as excited about programming as about getting a hole in the head. Which is very good - I would hate having to do the kind of work that, say, nurses and doctors do, but I am glad that many out there want to do it. The second possibility is that the aforesaid companies just want to push for an oversupply of programmers in future decades - in which case, they are a bunch of self-serving bastards. Guess what? The second possibility looms much more likely.
Thank you for your support of teachers. I've already reported and weighed in a few times about this subject, and I'd like to just expand on a few of your points.
Unfortunately, money speaks, and superintendents listen. When someone walks into a sup's office and says, "I'd like to donate $50,000 to the district to buy more technology," who would say no? And, on a national scale, if Zuck & Gates walk into the president's office to say, "We'd like to donate $1,000,000 to get more school districts to code," do you think Obama would be any different?
I do wish that we would just let labor markets let supply and demand naturally encourage or discourage people from entering and leaving the profession, as it happened a decade ago. While Microsoft claims that we aren't supplying enough computer programmers to meet demand, the BLS begs to differ. Salaries have grown at 1.5% annually between 2004-2012, barely keeping up with inflation. All the while, we continue to bring in more H1B visa applicants. If these companies -really- want more programmers, all they need to do is raise salaries. It sounds like they have plenty to spare. Not to mention repatriating all that money would go a long ways in increasing tax revenues to help states pay for their K-12 institutions.
Does San Francisco count as a large school district? Knowing the demographics of 'Frisco, I decided to take a little look. It has around 58,500 students enrolled. Fresno Unified itself has over 73,000 with abutting Clovis having another 40,000. For comparison, Chicago has over 50,000 enrolled in Preschool and Kindergarden classes alone.
http://www.kidsdata.org/topic/558/publicschoolenrollment/table#fmt=749&loc=1,461,456,265&tf=84&sortType=asc
http://www.cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a-glance/Pages/Stats_and_facts.aspx
The ultimate intent of this effort is to bring programming salaries down to burger-flipping money, but instead it might teach kids the value and power of a general-purpose computer, leading to a crash in the demand for walled-garden computing devices. This could also create a more security-aware consumer base which will in turn increase demand for the most highly-skilled programmers, driving salaries up.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Teach logic, critical thinking, nutrition, health, personal finance, and civics. THEN code.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Jus tthe other day, someone was talking about coding as being like a second or third language and how it would be an essential skill for jobseekers in the future. They were talking about people who have no existing skills and providing programs to train them.
Are they kidding.. The world doesn't need millions upon millions of coders, and if there were all those 10s of millions, the wages would drop to minimum wage levels, and their idea that "we'll teach them coding and they'll get high paid jobs" falls apart.
What the world needs is basic computer literacy: know what's possible, and what's deception. Beyond that, it's like knowing how to type. Today's world is keyboard oriented. knowing how to type, how to mouse, how to do simple editing... that's useful for everyone. But it doesn't need to be taught in first grade. For gosh sakes, let's let the kids learn how to read. That's a MUCH more useful skill, and more correlated with lifetime income.
Sure, offer some exposure to programming/cs like concepts, just as we introduce arithmetic, and that small fraction of people who have the innate ability can be recognized.
If you look at the languages that non-programmers actually take to, they tend to be dynamically typed imperative languages with a minimum of boilerplate and very forgiving syntax. BASIC, Perl, JavaScript. Terrible languages for actually doing real work, but newbies like them.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Who benefits from this? Microsoft, Apple, etc., are in the business of selling product. There is no doubt that very bright people are employed in these companies, but the first priority of each of them is to maximizing shareholder's value. Unless one wants to hold to the position that what is good for the shareholders is good for the masses, then we should not have big businesses designing the curriculum for the future.
If these companies want to be altruistic, then fine, give the funding to the local school districts and let the local school districts determine what is best for their constituents. We already hear complaints about how big government is not responsive to the local needs of schools. Why would we expect big business to be any different?
of teaching CS skills. all they really want to teach is the all overpowering extrovert's rules which basically sum up to speak up or die. that's the opposite of what we need in CS.
...unless there are still people learning plumbing instead of coding.