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:Some dreams don't count

[AthanasiusKircher]

"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."

Can we all just mod the Summary as "-1 Troll"?

I'm absolutely serious. There are clearly lots of stories posted on Slashdot which seem designed to create flamewars, but this one is incredibly blatant. Rather than just discussing a current speech of Obama and his ideas, we get a final sentence which appears to be referencing gender discrimination in IT, which the OP obviously knows will rile people up here.

Except there are number of problematic things there:

(1) The link is to a speech Obama gave in 2006. Why is that news?

(2) The speech is given before a diversity advocacy organization (NCWIT = National Center for Women & Information Technology), and if you listen to the context of the speech, that's clearly why he brings it up. Any politician invited to give a speech at an event like that obviously is going to try to find a way to complement the work the organization is doing.

(3) If you listen to the context of the quotation, it's actually not about IT. He mentions a number of different disciplines and a number of career paths, mostly not in IT. So, TFS is deliberately distorting the quotation to rile up Slashdot.

(4) Note the placement of the quotation -- it's the last thing in TFS, guaranteed to be the last thing people read before posting. So, you read the beginning and all the crappy flamewars about Obama and how he doesn't understand IT or whatever start coming up, but then you get to the last sentence and you're clearly supposed to be outraged and ready to start flaming.

JUST STOP IT. Can we skip all the stupid debates over gender and women in IT today? I'm not a big fan of Obama, but if you do want to discuss Obama's recent speech or possible initiatives, can we skip a bunch of crap concerning a speech from a decade ago with a quotation taken out of context??

Re:How would that work?

[AmiMoJo]

When I was 3 years old my pre-school had a programmable toy car. You gave it a list of commands like go forward 1m, turn left, go forward 2m and it executed them. Many years later we got a computer, and the manual told me how to write software in BASIC.

Without those opportunities to be introduced to programming I might not have studied and eventually done it as a job. That's what introductory classes are for. De-mystify software and give children the basic concepts and skills to pursue it, and an opportunity to see if it interests them.

It works.