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Jason Bradbury Believes Coding Lessons In Schools Are a Waste of Time (trustedreviews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Famous TV personality Jason Bradbury, who hosts The Gadget Show, believes that the UK government is wasting its time trying to teach kids learn how to code. In a recent interview, he said, 'My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them. I fundamentally disagree with the government initiatives to get my kids coding. It's a complete waste of time. Soon startups will just be run by really creative people -- there won't be a coder with bad social skills stood on the stage. The future will just be about being creative. This is why we need to challenge STEM and introduce an art component and rename it STEAM -- science, technology, engineering, art and maths."
Stop This Everybody Must...stuff
I don't totally disagree with this statement. I got into coding many years ago because I loved solving problems, and used a scientific approach to doing just that. Teaching the languages of coding just to move something around on the screen is pretty pointless. It seems many of the 'coding' classes in schools do just that.
Using coding, however, as a broader set of methodologies to teaching problem solving and how you break it down and arrive at a solution IS a good thing. This will prepare our kids for the future no matter what it brings as they will then know how to approach a problem and solve it. That is what I find lacking in the newer grads I work with today.
There are many tools, techniques, and ways to make that fun and interesting for children and I wish we would change the focus to address that and stop focusing on just coding. A programmer without problem solving abilities is like a writer with perfect grammar, but nothing to say.
Creative people are overrated. It takes sober, well trained engineers to produce safe, reliable, electromechanical products, drugs, chemicals, etc. Try telling an FDA or FAA auditor that they "just don't get it."
Anyone who has written assembler knows that modern static analysis and optimising compilers will write far better code than the average assembler programmer; most chips expect hinting and other flags which are not really part of a human activity. Everything else is just assist.
So the creativity element of programming is still very human driven. It will be for a long, long time. But the mechanics of software programming has become increasingly invisible to the programmer.
As another person says (as if it wasn't just a cheap media-whoring attention-grab) - what a twat.
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Who?
Oh that cock who has no idea how to sell or test gadgets and hosts a program where they show them on a screen for a fraction of a second without showing you anything useful or discussing a single down-side?
And who - it appears - has no actual qualifications (besides a pilot licence) listed anywhere that would suggest anything "gadgety" in his background?
Sorry, but he's an author / TV presenter. I've yet to see any qualification beyond that that gives him any say in education or coding at all.
And the number of times I've cringed at things he's said/done on that program, I couldn't count. Last time I saw it, he was screaming like a little girl because some $2000 remote control car he was controlling nearly spun out of control because he "forgot to steer".
Don't even get me started on the crap they recommend on that show. It's basically a 30-minute advert for 50 products and then a "competition" at the end to win them all.
20 years ago my computer science prof used this to explain why I should stay for my PhD rather than get a job doing real work (which at the time, was paying really, really well). If anything there is less effort in AI now than there was then, I've seen no attempts at self-programming computers yet, just languages with higher and higher levels of abstraction that take care of some messy details for you (with extreme limitations).
Meanwhile, I'm not sure why "creative people" is mutually exclusive with STEM, you don't need the 'A' to be creative. I associate the 'A' with technical skills in the fine arts, performing arts or academic skills in art history, literature, anthropology, etc.. You can be incredibly uncreative in any of those fields too (and still be successful), but have an excellent grasp of the skills. See the story about the Chinese village dedicated to copying artwork: high artistic skill, 0 creativity. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2375270/Dafen-Oil-Painting-Village-thousands-artists-recreate-paintings-sale-overseas.html, although there was one yesterday I can't find as well).
Creativity is orthogonal to the canvas you choose to work with. Coding skills however are very likely to enable you in any chosen profession, even if you do not do it professionally. I cannot count how many times in life some very simple thing did not exist because "we don't have a coder free". Sometimes that thing was just sending out an email periodically, or pulling stuff from a db into a spreadsheet in a particular way. There's no reason why everyone can't do things like that for themselves, except the lack of training and the belief that it is somehow hard.
Teach kids how to do algebra, teach them history, how to write poetry, how to play a musical instrument, how to code, how to speak in front of a group of people. They'll self-select into something they enjoy and/or are good at.
He's right that teaching every kid coding is a waste of time. Not because coders will become obsolete (who will write the code that writes code for everyone else?), but because not everyone has interest in or the proclivity for coding.
Governments didn't scramble to teach every kid electronics from 1930-1970, nor did they scramble to teach every kid auto mechanics from 1950-1980. Education programs have enough trouble teaching kids math and critical thinking, how the hell are they going to wrap their heads around programming?
By his logic, kids shouldn't be taught anything because soon enough technology will do everything for them.
My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them
Coding is how you communicate with a machine in order to tell it what you want it to do. Even if we one day have a computer doing what is today thought of as coding, you still need to tell the computer what you want it to do, and *that* will be what coding is.
There was a time when people would code in actual machine language, and then we invented assemblers which did that for us. We then coded in assembly language until we invented compilers which did the assembly code for us. Now we code in "high level" programming languages. Maybe we will go up a few more levels, and computers will do more of the work for us. It doesn't mean we won't code anymore. It means we will be more productive and there will be even more benefit to knowing how to communicate with these magical machines that are willing to work for free.
And here I thought I could make a career being a software engineer.
You haven't been reading the ads lately, then. The vast majority of positions advertised heavily emphasize HTML, CSS and JavaScript or similar front-end stuff. Back-end? Not so much. Not good for those of us who are wizards with algorithms and lousy graphics artists. But as long as you do it pretty and do it fast, and do it cheap, that's all that counts, right?
'Cause with any luck you'll have executed your exit strategy before the security exploits get announced on the news.
That would be what happens when you let people who know nothing about an industry decide how we should educate students who will work in that industry.
First, we don't need to double the number of STEM majors. There aren't jobs for them.
Second, even if you get past that, what they're missing is that having a major in those other subjects means that you have faculty who can teach classes in those areas. If you stop funding the French major, you aren't going to have more than the first year of French, and eventually you won't even have that. So how will students in STEM majors take French?
The reality is that almost nobody wants programmers who just know how to code. Software engineers need knowledge of other subjects so that they have a better understanding of the real world. Those outside interests are a big part of what drives innovation—new ideas from people with different perspectives arising out of different experiences. The more you cut education for non-STEM majors, the more you end up with a monoculture—people who have exactly the same perspective, and who do things the same way they have always been done, solely because that's the way they've always done it. The only possible end result is an America that cannot compete in the global market, that can only be a mindless producer of works designed by people in other countries.
College is not supposed to be a trade school. It is supposed to prepare you for the real world. If you want a trade school, go to a trade school. If you want to be a well-rounded STEM major who won't be stuck competing with foreign programmers for low-end jobs until the day you die, go to a college and take as many classes beyond the STEM curriculum as you possibly can.
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