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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
Are a bunch of disaffected youths, wearing disheveled 2nd hand clothes, razor hair cuts, smoking their hacked e-cigs, putting safety pins in their leather jacket lapels.. standing around.. looking like a bunch of punks.. a bunch of STEAM punks.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them.
The 1980's called and want their software back.
"My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them"
Computers already do this. You used to have to code by manually entering the 1s and 0s but now there are things called compilers which actually do the coding for you. All you have to do is write some simple instructions saying what you want the computer to do and the compiler does the coding for you.
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.
Don't worry, the Morlocks will take care of it for them... and they barely eat any of the Eloi at all.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
>> "Bradbury went on to describe the SAM Labs system as âoea perfect example of this prediction that coding will not exist in the future."
>> "I bought a big box of SAM Labs kit. My kids can come in here and decide to make a device where if my son squeezes his teddy he will send me a tweet to say, 'I love you.' Or if you walk through a laser tripwire it will set off an alarm. It interacts with actual hardware, actual code and all it requires is a squeeze, a drag-and-drop and a little imagination."
So that's how we will all be coding the complex software that controls our aircraft and nuclear power plants in the future.
"The reactor is going into meltdown"
"Quick, squeeze the teddy bear and imagine it not killing us all!"
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Stop This Everybody Must...stuff
It's not that everybody must, it's that most should.
A lot of people are really unfathomably stupid. And they could increase their intelligence by probably an order of magnitude if they internalized a few important additional mental patterns. One of those is if-then statements.
If A then B. If C then not D. Just the idea of reacting intelligently, of planning ahead a little bit and choosing an action based on what happens, rather than intuiting your way through life.
Of course almost nobody is going to do that all the time, and that's good because habits and ignorance save a lot of time and can make life much more practical. But people should have the chance to learn.
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.
I don't know if where I work is the exception but nearly all the managers come from a technical background. The way you become a manager is you win contracts for work for the people you manage. Much of the work we do is R&D so a nontechnical person has a hard time putting together a comprehensive proposals to win work.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I totally agree - I used to be part of a demo group and we could make speed-ups which were serious. Lots of it using our domain knowledge - knowing what implicit boundaries are to be expected on a data-set often means we could reduce tons of cpu work to a few LUTs and work magic from them instead.
But I wouldn't write an OS (or even a standard commercial shrink-wrap application) that way, and you know it :-D
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It's not the exception. The parent's assertion is flawed. A coder who also has management skills will get promoted if she wants. A coder with no management skills won't get promoted. Just like almost any other field.
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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.
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.
Actually, I simultaneously agree and disagree with this statement. In the sense that teaching kids to code in say, Javascript as a job skill, I agree wholeheartedly.
In the sense that learning to code teaches a bunch of other important skills I disagree. Learning to code is an excellent way to learn general problem-solving skills, and also how to coherently communicate complex ideas.
Although probably the most important life skill that can be taught by learning to code is that all programs have bugs. And that you shouldn't trust software any more than you absolutely have to, and if your navigation software tells you that dirt road through the Mojave Desert is a great shortcut you might want to reconsider.
Well, if you were a competent software engineer, you would have realized this a few years ago. While I have nothing but compassion for the medical profession and software engineers who entered the industry in the last decade, the writing is on the wall now. Todays kids need to be raised to be champion entrepreneurs, utterly able to deal with uncertain, near future job trends. Or be good at not getting caught, in a Mad Max dystopia.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The only rationale behind the "everybody needs to learn to code" is to further lower wages and that's why nobody in their right mind would touch programming with a barge pole.
Welcome to the aerospace industry in the early 1980's. Except automation is going to hit all areas of employment in twenty years. It makes as much sense to avoid programming as it does advanced math; "you'll never use it...". And yet, perhaps, listening to the knee jerk isn't the smartest move after all.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
From what I've seen, management is not a great way to get ahead in engineering companies. Lower-level managers are not paid any more than engineers, and they usually have more work to do, such as spending a bunch of time in meetings. If you're good at the political stuff, you can work your way up to higher-level management, where you really do get paid more.
The problem with management is that the skills aren't very transferrable. If you're a good programmer, you can get a job lots of places, because the skills are transferrable. So if one company doesn't work out, or lays you off, oh well, just go apply to a dozen more. You want more money? No problem, just apply to more jobs; you get a big raise by changing companies.
Managers can't do that. Companies like to promote from within, so if you're a middle manager at some big company, other companies are not going to be very keen on hiring you, because they want someone who understands their company, not some other company. So if you get laid off, you'll be starting all over again as a first-line manager, getting paid the same as the engineers but with more work to do. And with the way companies lay people off in droves these days, this is very likely to happen.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I already have the code generators; all the different features that the idiots want are just checkboxes or radio buttons.
Does a new web whatthewhat cost $3000, $5000, $9000, $14000, $35000, or $65000? Yes!
If you pay $35k for a new dynamic web application, I could have done it for $3000. But I wouldn't give out a telephone contact, it would prepaid and email-only. ;)
So even here where all the code is written by humans, the only reason that automation doesn't replace 99% of the work is that the people who need the service still assume they're getting something better if they hire people to write a bunch of new bugs on top of the framework that does the actual work. And they want to have somebody to call on the phone and get reassurances that everything is OK, and they want that person to also pretend to be the one writing the code.
There is no way a computer is going to replace project managers any time soon. But automation can already replace most of the programmers. But the clients haven't figured it out yet.
hire people to write a bunch of new bugs on top of the framework that does the actual work.
That made me lol. It holds true all the way from Excel power users to the EEs who design the chip circuits. There's a kind of recursive irony in the fact that the EE cannot design a modern cpu without the aid of modern CAD/CAM tools.
The guy in TFA sounds like an "ideas man", ie: an expert in wishful thinking, exactly who does he think will create his code-less utopian future? Having said that I think he has a point buried under his poor choice of words. There is a tendency for geeks to dismiss philosophy, art, music, literature, as enjoyable but impractical pursuits which is odd since most of the great mathematical/scientific minds of the last 500yrs have not only cherished these things but they have also contributed heavily to their content and growth.
Art and Science are bedfellows that feed off each other, Science itself is a philosophy based on the faith that the real world exists outside of our own thought processes, religion is wishful thinking combined with a lack of imagination.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.