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Apple CEO Tim Cook: I'd Require All Children To Start Coding In 4th Grade (thehill.com)
This week Apple CEO Tim Cook argued at Startup Fest Europe that coding should be a 'second language' taught to all children. theodp shares two quotes from a YouTube video. "We fundamentally believe that coding is a language and that just like other languages are required in school, coding should be required in school," Cook stated. "I do think coding is as important-- if not more important -- as the second language that most people learn in today's world," Cook later added... "I would go in and make coding a requirement starting at the fourth or fifth grade, and I would build on that year after year after year...I think we're doing our kids a disservice if we're not teaching them and introducing them in that way."
Meanwhile, The Hill reported this week that The Computer Science Education Coalition -- which includes Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and dozens of other companies -- hired a fourth "advocacy firm" that specializes in "mobilizing groups of people to influence outcomes...to help convince policymakers to provide money to computer science education for grades K-12," and they're seeking an initial investment of $250 million. I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about government funding of grade school coding classes.
Meanwhile, The Hill reported this week that The Computer Science Education Coalition -- which includes Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and dozens of other companies -- hired a fourth "advocacy firm" that specializes in "mobilizing groups of people to influence outcomes...to help convince policymakers to provide money to computer science education for grades K-12," and they're seeking an initial investment of $250 million. I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about government funding of grade school coding classes.
Has offshore labor gotten too expensive for Apple?
I'd actually argue that we need a hell of a lot more humanities in our schools... learning about how to treat each other, what makes a good life, how to find purpose, learning from history, how to work together to create a society that works for everyone (not just an efficient, technocratic one where everyone who matters is staring at their laptop, and everyone else is condemned to minimum-wage servitude).
Tech-inclined kids will find coding on their own -- I was writing QBASIC in 4th grade -- but it seems kids these days know far too little about history, government, and sometimes even basic civility, compared to the past.
Then again, maybe I'm just getting old and crochety -- and old people have been complaining about kids for millenia.
How about getting rid of H1B's with that
Troubleshooting. Everyone uses it at some point eventually. It's a pure and yet practical form of critical thinking. Teaching coding? Most people won't get much out of it I think.
""I would go in and make coding a requirement starting at the fourth or fifth grade"
Not this "everybody gotta learn to code" bullshit again....
Guess what? Jasper Johns thinks that everybody ought to learn to paint. Magic Johnson thinks everyone should learn to play basketball.
They're ALL wrong.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If I could get all kids to actually, well, read in the fourth grade under our current system I'd be happy. Let's get the essentials fixed before we start adding extravagances.
Or sew.
When I went to junior high school in the 70s, everyone (boys) had to take a round of industrial arts. Which included wood shop, metal shop, drafting, electric/electronic shop, print shop, etc. I think girls got home ec. Then in high school it was optional, and included auto shop and home construction. Pretty much every jr. high school and high school had all this stuff on the premises of every school in the system. (Los Angeles, FWIW. I believe it has all been dismantled now, thanks to Prop 13.)
Schools now don't teach kids any of that stuff unless the kids decide to go to the voc tech high school. But where I live now, choosing the voc tech is an all or nothing deal, it's too far away to go to, if, e.g., you just wanted to take auto shop for a semester.
He may be a transport, scheduling, and efficiency expert, but he's no Jobs.
Coding isn't another language. It requires a mindset. The vast majority of people don't want to code and will never have to code.
I consider coding to require the same skills as a novelist. An author has to build a world, keep the entire construct in his mind, make changes, and understand how those changes affect things before and after.
Apple is plowing forward due to Jobs' work and Apple under Cook has yet to release anything insanely great.
At what age did Tim Cook learn to program? Probably wasn't in 4th grade and yet, he seems to be pretty successful. Instead of teaching kids to program, how about teaching them how to be creative thinkers. Teach them to be problem solvers. Then, if they do decide to program, they will have something to program.
Cook also doesn't have any kids. For him it is always "other people's kids."
He seems a lot like Balmer to me. Milking their existing product lines and introducing new products that just follow the competition.
It seems to me that the CEO of a company that's dodging taxes shouldn't quibble over how our taxes are spent.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And this sort of excuse is why so few people understand how computers work. FWIW, I started learning to write BASIC code using the "Teach Yourself BASIC" series of books and tapes in first grade. The only thing hard about it was that I didn't understand multiplication or division, so I didn't really understand those parts of the exercises, but everything else was straightforward.
In about third or fourth grade, I went to a music education conference with my parents, and went to a "Computers in Music" lecture, and they couldn't get their software to work. And suddenly, there I was, this little kid raising my hand and walking up to these college students and teachers to point out their typo.
By fifth grade, I was writing Apple II programs for things like quizzing people on arbitrary subjects. I disassembled part of a computer in class just to point out the various electronic components inside it. And so on.
By the time I took algebra in eighth grade, I was already teaching BASIC programming to other students. The concept of variables was second nature, so algebra came pretty easily. It was basically just a more advanced form of simplifying boolean expressions, just with numbers instead of booleans, and math instead of logical operators. And instead of assigning something to a variable and getting a result based on known values, you were figuring out what values those variables could plausibly have.
So no, in my experience, learning to program makes learning math easier, not the other way around. Math has very limited value when it comes to learning how to write software. It certainly helps you understand how to do math with a computer, but that's a tautology. So you are technically correct that you can't learn how to do math in spreadsheets without knowing math. By that same standard, clearly you can't learn how to drive a car until you learn how to adjust the fuel-air mixture in a carburetor, because race car drivers have to know how to do that....
It does not follow.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
How do You know that programmers who are also musicians are like that because music enables them to understand math? My bet is on any of the logical fallacies, especially post hoc (many technical schools have music because it is the easiest thing to teach technical people, but there is no causal effect between being capable to play and programming), joint effect (both math/programming and playing music requires a calm, analytical mind that is capable to withstand punishing amount of self-training), or even wrong direction (it is people who program who later become musicians, and not musicians who later become programmers).
As for music teaching You skills that give You a leg up in math or make it easier to write code -- I'd like a citation for that, because that smells like absolute bullshit.
As for grammar, I really don't know any, in any of the languages that I speak -- even my mother tongue. And the same is true for most of native speakers of any language -- do a test and ask a person who speaks a language as a native to codify it for You in nice and rigid forms of grammars. Let's not forget, that human grammar is rather different from mathematical and computer grammars -- more rigid and often too formal for most people to "speak", or even comprehend.
The only part of this hilarious rant of Yours that I partially agree with is the history part, but that is of limited effect as well. Technology makes it rather hard, as it changes the playing field very rapidly. To give You an example: designing a new programming language today has the same problems as it did 40 years ago -- so that is the part that we can learn from. But it also has new and more exciting problems right now -- extensive libraries, debugger and syntax support for major IDEs and so on are now much more of an issue for a language to live or die.
As for these things being vital to computer science -- You sound like a failed painter or a musician that learned to code to do anything useful in Your life. Yes, it is an ad personam, but that part really sounds like You provide a forced justification that something You had personally enjoyed also had a deep effect on programming -- that's a choice-supportive bias. Please, resist writing a sequential, causal narrative into Your life -- Your life was definitely much greater than that. My bet is that You feel that code works like music, because it does -- to You. You have an affinity for both, and had learned to operate abstractions found in music, and then partially reused some of these abstractions in programming later on. But the same thing could have happened to You by learning architecture, furniture design, bookmaking, medicine or gardening -- any abstraction learnned in any of these fields, or any indeed possible field, could potentially be reused in programming.
Reducing humanities education is a solution. I would really love not to be tortured by classical literature, and having to paint or being forced to play a fucking flute. Not a single part of that was useful in my life, and I heavily doubt that it will. We really don't need as much humanities as people who wish to become musicians later on. And they don't need as much programming. How about we recognize talent as early as possible, and then help people recognize it -- and then, if they want it, help them develop it on their own. Stop education, it's a cancer of the soul.
Welcome to the civilized world. It's entirely appropriate for the state to make sure the people who design our buildings and bridges, or who cut us open with surgical instruments, or who fly us from city to city in jumbo jets are actually qualified to do so.
Are you doing any of those things? No? Then your "examples" are irrelevant.
And yet, you were the one complaining that Tim Cook had the audacity to call what we do "coding"
Because he clearly ISN'T A "CODER" (or whatever you want to call it). IMO it's perfectly reasonable for someone to object to another person with no clue inappropriately using terminology in their field while at the same time objecting to others with little to no clue trying to pigeonhole their "title" with arbitrary tests/certifications.