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Drag-and-Drop "CS" Tutorials: the Emperor's New Code?
theodp writes: Teaching kids computer science is a great movement," writes HS senior David Yue, "however, to overly dilute the magnitude of the difficulty in regards to the subject area of coding and to create the illusion of mastering a 'superpower' (Code.org) is a huge mistake. There are many videos and articles on the Internet these days that have demonstrated positive support towards computer science education. Below these articles, one can find many comments, left mostly by parents and supporters. These people usually express how proud they are that their children have an opportunity to learn computer science or how proud they are that computer science is being integrated at a more substantial level into the education system." But Drag and Drop Doesn't = Coding, argues Yue. "Parents and teachers today who aren't technical need to be aware that the drag and drop code or the candy-coated learning process does not effectively teach children programming but eventually causes a huge amount of shock once they are immersed in real code." Yue's Emperor's-New-Code warning comes days before President Obama — a graduate of Code.org's drag-and-drop Disney Princess coding tutorial — asks Congress for $4-billion-and-change in the upcoming budget to fund his "Computer Science for All" K-12 initiative.
It shouldn't matter how the code itself is created. You can code the same thing in any number of languages in any number of code types.
If the kids don't know what loops are, what case statements are etc, then they'll still suck at "coding" even if you are dumping a bunch of text based functions on their head.
At some point there was a Lego Mindstorm competition for school children aged around 14 and I was hired to assist them on the final day. Lego developed a drag n drop way of programming, which is supposed to be usable for children. Mind you, Lego actually recommends using 3rd party "real" programming tools as they are better if you can figure out how to use them. However this competition was designed for the GUI approach.
It was a complete disaster. Despite having worked on this project for a month, they were still pretty much clueless. While they had clearly seen the GUI before, their understanding of the result of the input they provided was like it was day one of trying the system. One group managed to make their Lego robot fail the task 3 times at the very same spot and I asked them why they carried on trying after they had seen that it doesn't work and the answer was "we try to get it used to the task and hope it will figure it out eventually". One group also vanished and was caught an hour later. It turned out that they had just joined the competition in order to cut classes and didn't care for it at all. That's always a good starting point.
Also I would have to question the quality of the school teachers. Not in general, but the specific ones showing up for this competition. One in particular annoyed me. He was supposed to be the expert on the school he came from, yet he had no interest in talking about the tasks, theory behind it or anything. Instead he went on with ultra left wing propaganda about how the left wing activists should have the right to use the building they want to use (without paying) and that it's ok to kick out the capitalistic pig who owned it and how wrong the court and police was in saying otherwise. I was like "shut up". Also the case he referred to was one where the owner ended up going personal bankrupt due to getting stuck on the running costs without access to the building. The politicians at city hall decided to give the "young political minds" a building to meet in, but they refused and said they preferred the one they took by force and violence. What that has to do with programming is a good question, but according to that teacher it made perfect sense. Somehow I'm not surprised his pupils failed extremely badly.
I'm not a fan of the modern school system. The learning by doing approach without any theoretical background and the "divide pupils into groups for debates" have failed every time I have seen it in action. You will not learn how to say multiply by talking to 3 other kids who can't multiply either. Go fix the schools first and make the teachers.... actually teach and tell the children what they need to know before trying to add even more stuff they can't learn to a level they can use anyway.
Also regarding learning CS. I learned some languages and stuff and could code stuff I wanted to code. At least that's what I thought, but in reality I had problems diverting from the examples in the books. Once I learned C and focused on what is actually the basics in programming, I suddenly became able to design code unrelated to examples in any of the languages I knew at the time. I now firmly believe that the only way to really learn how to program something is to learn the basics and avoid all the shortcuts people come up with, like drag 'n' drop. People can put the jigsaw together while the teacher is watching, but they don't actually know what they are doing, making the whole task pointless.