Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.