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.

Comments

We need a different term for this

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't "computer science." This is assembly-line work.

Re:We need a different term for this

[Half-pint HAL]

This isn't "computer science."

The problem is that the most appropriate term, "computer literacy", has been hijacked to mean MS Office basic skills.

Re:We need a different term for this

[BarbaraHudson]

It's not even computer literacy. Especially since pair programming won't feed their inner geek, is impossible to fairly grade (who did more work, etc) and will lead to kids who can't grasp the concept pairing with the little egomaniacal sh*ts and hating it after hearing "like this, dummy" too many times.

Re:We need a different term for this

[TWX]

When I was in Junior High we had two classes that were paired for the year, the first was "Computers", and the second was, "Technology". As this was before most households had computers in the home, in Computers we learned how to use a GUI operating system (Macintosh LC platform if memory serves), what a word processor did, what a spreadsheet did, how rudimentary object drawing software (ie, not the kind with pixel-by-pixel manipulation) worked, how to make presentation slides, etc. This was designed to get us ready to do term papers, to do a very simple amount of math for either science class data processing or to prepare us for higher-level math, and how to create presentations so if we did class presentations we could use technology to do so.

In Technology, we used computers for other goals. We had a stress-analyser that would crush things and give us plots of the way the item being crushed performed. We had software that we could use to mimic drag coefficient testing over a 2d representation of a car body. We had access to a wide-carriage plotter. We had the kids programming language "LOGO" to use to do vector manipulation of a cursor called the Turtle. We had plenty of non-computer-based things like a pneumatic kit to build simple pneumatic circuits and pneumatic machines, we had model rockets, we had to build a bridge to handle so much weight, we had to build something to make an egg survive drops from height using only cardboard and paper and glue.

The term "Computer Science" wasn't part of the curriculum until high school, where we knuckled down and started playing with C.

The biggest problem with trying to do this kind of thing for all kids and for multiple years at younger and younger ages boils down to two things- cost, and the allocation of classroom time. If there are six available hour-long periods in the day for possible instruction, and two classes (ie Computers versus Technology) at the same time, with 30 kids each, then that's 30*2*6, or 360 seats available at a maximum, or 180 per teacher. In reality teachers usually have down around 120 to 140 students spread across five class periods, as they need prep and lunch and time to deal with other things, which brings it down to 240-280 per year. Then you have all of the money to spend to equip and to maintain the learning labs and the staffing costs for that maintenance.

Most of the schools that I attended had far, FAR more than 360 students. The JHS and HS campuses had 500 students per grade level, and the elementaries had probably 120-150 kids per grade. These kinds of opportunities were not offered until Junior High simply because it was not possible to put every child through these kinds of classes, so they became electives that the student could choose to sign up for once the educational model meant that students changed teachers every hour already; in the elementary model where students generally remain with the same teacher for the whole day other than one-hour-a-day changesups to once-a-week classes for music, or for art, or for computer lab, or library, or for a lab-type of science it's really not practical to give the kids enough exposure to actually develop a curriculum around the material. Kids would have to have time every day or nearly every day for it to really work, and since the educational model at all levels is to provide as much education for as little cost as possible, this simply isn't going to happen in public schools.

Exposure to tech is generally a good thing, but unfortunately it costs money, a lot of money, and not everyone wants to have the same amount of exposure or can even benefit with the same amount of exposure. That's why concentrating on fundamentals as young children and reserving that specialized training for a little later makes more sense. I would rather see things like logic being taught, which can be irrespective of a computer, when kids are younger, so that when they do get use of the software on a computer they already have mastery of the basics, along the lines of how we don't let kids use calculators for basic arithmetic until they're studying a higher discipline of math like Trig or Calculus, where the calculator is only assisting in making the rote basic math happen faster.

Re:We need a different term for this

[BarbaraHudson]

Let me re-express myself - if you can't collect performance metrics that you can have confidence in, how do you tell if you're doing any good, just wasting time and resources, or actively doing harm? How do you determine who needs more attention to a particular subject, and give it to them? Grading the students is also a good way of grading the teacher. It's a good way of finding out which teachers can't teach.

Re:We need a different term for this

[dmiller1984]

Pair programming is how you engage in affirmative action without having to spell it out in school policy. You pair up the students who can't/won't succeed with the students who can and will succeed. The successful student will do all the work to keep up their GPA and the shit student can coast his/her way to a passing grade. All while avoiding the political minefield that would come with forcing more girls, more people of color, or more of whatever group is the cause de jour into programming through social promotion and affirmative action.

That's pretty cynical. I use pair programming in my classes, but the kids can choose their pairs. It's not meant to give kids better grades. In fact, I usually only use it for tasks I won't be grading. It's meant so the kids can work with someone else and bounce ideas off each other to see a different perspective and hopefully gain a better understanding of CS. The kids have to take turns on the keyboard so even if one kid is a much better programmer, they are forced to talk about what to do instead of just typing all the code themselves in silence.

Kids need to understand information not coding

[devforhire]

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.

Reminds me of Beauty Pagent

[avandesande]

Dress your child up like an adult and make them do adult things....

I have an idea ...

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:I have an idea ...

[gstoddart]

I know actual teachers, with multiple degrees in the field of education ... and quite frankly I trust them a whole lot more than I trust the self-serving actions of a corporation who ultimately wants more cheap labor.

I don't trust the motivations here, and I can damned well tell you this isn't evidence based policy ... it's "do what we ask because we're throwing money at you" and it sounds cool.

This is claiming something to be the way of the future and somehow getting people to follow you hook, line, and sinker into believing you have any idea of what works and what will educate children.

Re:corporations should stay the hell out

[epyT-R]

Centralization of control leaves systems vulnerable to manipulation by powerful interests, public and private. It's not like the state has done a stellar job either.

Hmm.....

[King_TJ]

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.

they did this to themselves.

[nimbius]

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.

Re:Stupid idea

[110010001000]

Computers cannot program themselves. People have been saying what you have for the last 50+ years (1960s). It hasn't happened, and won't happen. AI research has been a dead end for the last 40 years. We can barely even make simple programs that function without flaws. People expect too much progress. Chances are computers 20 years from now will look like the same computers we have today.

They need to know how to learn

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Delusional

[iamacat]

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.

Re:Delusional

[BarbaraHudson]

You shouldn't even need to whet their appetite. Computers are everywhere - if they want to learn how to program, they will.

Re:Delusional

[iamacat]

Computers are everywhere, but they don't naturally expose programming tools anymore. It would be better if they did, but we have to work with reality of locked down iPads where you need to pay an annual fee to program.

Re:Delusional

[BarbaraHudson]

Chipmunk BASIC works on Intel Macs, Linux, and 64-bit versions of Windows, including (tested this morning) Windows 8.1, so it should run under 10 as well. The 'B' in BASIC stands for 'Beginners', so why not?

Really?

[wkwilley2]

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.

Re:First grade?

[Jason Levine]

My wife is a teacher by trade (though not currently in a classroom) and she's considered homeschooling our kids. Not because she hates the teaching profession/science (she loves both), but because politicians and corporations have decided their say on how a child is educated is more important than a teacher's. Teachers where we live are being pressured to read from the state provided script and prepare the kids for the test. They're being chided if they don't buy into the notion that all children learn in the same way at the same pace simply because some politician "knows teaching." (Imagine a Dilbert strip where the PHB is the politician and Dilbert is the knowledgeable teacher and you've pretty much got the teaching situation in New York.)

Seems like a good idea

[butchersong]

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.

One of those actual teachers...

[Pollux]

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.

Re:Terrible

[penandpaper]

Do you want a micro-apology? How many micro-fucks should be given? I think you should cry a micro-bridge, build a micro-bridge and get over it.

Is micro-aggressive behavior == not really aggressive? Inconsequential aggression? Not really passive yet not really aggressive?

How many micro-aggression's does it take to make an aggression? I think we need 999999 micro-aggression's before a standard aggression can be determined for offense to be taken. Not sure, I will have to double check the Easily Offended Guide to be sure.

Lol, how do you get around with such thin skin that "micro aggressive" behavior creates a "toxic environment". Maybe a micro-toxic environment but that can be achieved by your standard grammar/spelling Nazi.

Grow some micro-thick skin already.

Re:Stupid idea

[gweihir]

Computers are exceptionally shoddy to completely unusable "programmers" once you leave behind no-insight-required compiling and localized optimization. I guess you have never seen synthesized code. A good programmer is architect and designer and coder. None of these roles can be filled by software above a very, very low level of difficulty.

Re:Terrible

[gweihir]

Problem solving is not a collaborative task above a not very high level of difficulty. Because above that, it requires insight and the only thing teamwork does is that it makes sure at most one on the team has that insight. Now, describing things accurately, asking precise questions, writing documentation, effective communication, those are useful. But pair-programming does not even work well when you have people with high levels of respective skills. It is a complete bust below that.

Re:without apps, app store profits wither

[gweihir]

I learned C about 30 years ago, when I needed more than the 64kB arrays Turbo Pascal gave me. These skills are still highly useful to me and I just recently finished a large project where C was the only sane option. Of course, C has this tendency to not help bad programmers write shoddy code, it makes them write non-working code. And that is actually an advantage.