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

How would that work?

[jafiwam]

It wouldn't.

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.

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.

Re:How would that work?

[AmiMoJo]

I knew this guy, an electrical engineer, who wrote Excel macros. Many of them were quite complex and useful. I'm sure he couldn't even tell you what a race condition is, let alone fix one, but fortunately such things never came up because, well, it's an Excel macro written in Visual BASIC. Very useful for doing engineering calculations, converting memory dumps into screenshots, even writing front ends for command line apps to make production staff's lives easier and less error prone.

I'm an accomplished programmer, mainly using lower level stuff like assembler and C, but also high level stuff like C# and Java. I've done bits of Javascript here and there, for various web projects, mostly personal. Fixing things in MediaWiki, implementing an on-line shop with Google Checkout, some fancy little animated flourishes etc. Never once had to fix a deadlock, lockout or race condition. What I did was relatively simple, sure, but still very useful and productive.

Not everyone has to be a master in their field to be useful. Simply being able to do Excel macros, i.e. to use the tool you have (a computer) more fully to work more productively, is a skill worth having. Teach the basics and people can apply that skill practically, which is more than you can say for a lot of the shit you learn in school.

Some dreams don't count

[MikeRT]

"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."

A lot of women also want to be able to be stay at home moms, supported by a husband on a single income. The effect of driving down wages in our field means it's that much harder for any woman married to a man in our field to have that option. What our economic policies mean for a lot of women in general is that should they want to give up their career, they can't, because cheap labor is more important than economic flexibility.

Re:Some dreams don't count

[mwvdlee]

The percentage of women in IT (about 26%) is higher than the percentage of women in politics (about 22%).
Remember that next time a politician claims "a long historic discrimination in the areas of gender".

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??

This Will Never Happen

[StormReaver]

Enough people fail to grasp the concept of a variable that I can confidently predict that the "anyone can code" mentality will hit an unassailable obstacle and be abandoned. The only question is how long it will take for this particular neurosis to metastasise and die.