The President Wants Every Student To Learn CS. How Would That Work? (npr.org)

theodp writes: The very first proposal President Obama put forth in his final State of the Union address Tuesday night for his remaining year in office was "helping students learn to write computer code." While the President wants every student to learn CS, NPR notes that getting a new, complex, technical subject onto the agendas of our public schools is a massive challenge, prompting it to ask, How Would That Work? That Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella attended the SOTU address as Michelle Obama's guest suggests the President is counting on the kindness of tech titans to help make things happen. Microsoft and Obama have worked together to try to get CS in the schools since at least 2006, when Microsoft announced a $1 million donation to NCWIT, which it indicated would facilitate "taking the discussion to a national stage" at a Washington, D.C. Innovation and Diversity Town Hall co-sponsored by the NSF and keynoted by then-Senator Barack Obama. "Most of all, what inspires me about this program [NCWIT] are the prospects of my two daughters," Obama said at the time (video). "I want them to go as far as their dreams may take them. And, unfortunately because of long historic discrimination in the areas of gender, we can't be assured of that."

Comments

Re:How would that work?

[serviscope_minor]

Glad you came here to say that.

There's this meme here that programming is super special in that only people who naturally gravitate to it with no outside assistance should ever consider it as a career. This is of course completely different from just about every other career ever.

It's also total rubbish.

I originally felt drawn to it, and self taught myself a lot. Of course the very reason I had access to those BBC computers is because of one of the first ever attempts to get kids to program at a large scale by providing usable computers to schools via the BBC. In later years I used my dad's laptop (every PC came with qbasic then) and he would often give me advice.

It's a nice fiction to think I did it all by myself but of course I didn't. I could only become drawn to it and make good on that because of the environment. Without the government assistance and without assistance and equipment from my dad, thing would have been different.

Then I went to uni and did engineering. Naturally programming was on the course but treated as well as might have been expected. I ended up helping my fellow students because I enjoyed doing that. Thing is some of them who had never programmed before at all picked it up really, really fast given a bit of assistance from me. I fondly remember some late night hacking sessions (one of them nicked some plastic pint glasses which we filled with coffee) doing the open ended bit of the project. Neither of the two I was hacking with had ever coded before.