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.

Comments

I'd argue we need more humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[thesupraman]

I counter your 'Tech inclined kids will find coding on their own' with:

(Drum roll please)

Parents should teach their children how to be good members of society, and it is not only not the place
of schools to teach that, but it is explicitly overstepping their role to assume they have the right to teach
children social values. Schools are for teaching facts and how to learn, not to shape hearts and
minds (although they certainly think thats their job these days)..

Or do you think some random teacher is the best person to decide on the social values or your child?
Think about it..

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[ArmoredDragon]

Being a good member of society usually means you don't discriminate, bully, etc.

That's nice and all, but it occurs to me that the message lately has been that you the only people you don't discriminate against are legally protected groups, and it's perfectly fine to discriminate against anybody else. For example, it's cool to bash rednecks, even though all of the ones I've met are some pretty honest working guys that are actually pretty fun to have a beer with, even though I don't like beer, or country music, or any of the other stuff they're in to. I mean shit, if rednecks were a minority group, people would shame you for using the term redneck.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Kokuyo]

I would be willing to bet hard cash that you are not content with the skill these parents nowadays show when it comes to morals, ethics and social behavior. Yet you think they should teach these values. Do you see where I'm going with this?

We must get away from this thinking that everybody needs to be self-sufficient and skilled at everything. We need to diversify education and stop putting so much stock in marketable skills. That way lies slavery and cultural ruin.

Human minds are too valuable to let them all be mined for productivity.

I mean, let's be serious here. Would this world be a better place if that fidgety child back when had been given ritalin and told to sit still instead of being sent to dance lessons and grow up to become the choreographer behind Cats and Phantom of the Opera? She's a millionaire, by the way. I expect she doesn't cry herself to sleep that she never got that fancy career in HR that might otherwise have been open to her.

Better idea.

[DRMShill]

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.

Oh for fuck's sake

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

""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.

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[uncqual]

Most people never directly use the Pythagorean theorem either (I don't count those in the construction trade who know the "3-4-5 rule" but don't realize why it works as "using it directly"), but we still teach it - should we stop doing that?

I think teaching some programming (not "computer science" as the post seems to confuse it with) in grade school is appropriate. It gives early exposure to students to an area that may be of interest to them. It helps them understand a system where they give an unthinking machine instructions and the unthinking machine follows those instructions faithfully and, if they instructions are "wrong", give the wrong result blindly. It teaches them that details matter on a "larger" project -- too many students that I've worked with in Fourth through Eighth grade think "guessing" is an appropriate response to most any math problem if they don't know the answer, programming will reinforce that "guessing" isn't usually a great way to proceed in such situations. It also helps the student understand why the computer "makes mistakes" (i.e., it's almost always a programmer that made the mistake) and that to make a computer do something "it should be able to do" requires telling it explicitly what to do (I'm leaving out systems that "learn" here -- I don't think we will be trying to, in the near future, teach Fourth Graders how such systems work).

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[dgatwood]

He's wrong, but not for the reason you think. He's wrong because fourth grade is way too late to start teaching kids to code. Computer programming is a language skill, and the later you learn, the harder it is to learn. You're better off teaching them the basics in first or second grade and then building it up a little bit at a time over the next decade.

And everybody ought to learn to paint and play basketball, too, at least a little bit. When I was a kid, we had art and music once a week, we had actual PE during recess some of the time. And so on. Not all of us went on to become artists or basketball players (for example, I only became decent at art when they invented multiple levels of "Undo", and I still can't shoot baskets to save my life), but exposing everyone to those skills early in life means that those who have the natural aptitude for them are more likely to become good at them. And for everyone else, as long as it is enjoyable and failure isn't treated as a mark of shame, there's no harm in teaching a wider range of skills in our schools.

In fact, I'd argue that the worst thing that has happened in our education system in the past couple of decades is the reduction in arts and music education. There's a strong correlation between musicianship and computer programming abilities. Yet for some baffling reason, we keep seeing schools reducing funding for the single most generally accessible way for students to learn the core skills that computer science depends upon:

• The ability to simultaneously interpret something at both a detailed (notes) and at a high level (musicianship)
• Grasp of how complex things are composed of many smaller things, such as individual instrument parts in a large ensemble work, and learning how they all fit together
• Basic algorithmic thinking, such as loops and conditional branching
• Reasoning skills (the sound system doesn't work; let's figure out why)
• Fractions (You can't learn to read music without it, so students who learn music as kids have a huge leg up in math later on.)

and so on. It amazes me that after decades of cuts in music education, suddenly, the tech industry wonders why CS graduation rate is declining. Well, duh. You can't lump computer science in with STEM and expect to get good outcomes. Computer science is not a science, nor is it math.

Sure, there are aspects of science and math in computer science, just as there are aspects of science and math in music—acoustics and psychoaccoustics, metrical division of measures, relationships between frequency and pitch and wavelength, and so on. And sure, when you make music or write code, you have to follow certain rules or it won't compile (performers won't be able to play it). However, on top of that foundation of rules and technical details, there's a huge mountain of artisanship, and that's what makes the difference between someone who does well in CS and someone who doesn't.

Performing music and writing software are closely related skills; composing music and writing computer software are nearly identical skills, and use basically the same parts of the brain in the same way. The difference is that most kids won't get interested in something that looks boring, and they initially see computers as boring. Music doesn't have that problem.

Of course, if we could make programming more fun, that might help, at least a little, but either way, the best way to end up with more programmers is by having more music classes, more art classes, more dance, more theater, more... everything but STEM. There's some irony for you.

Really....

[johnsmithperson123]

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.

Re: Possible translation:

[Bing Tsher E]

Cook also doesn't have any kids. For him it is always "other people's kids."

Re:Possible translation:

[E-Rock]

He seems a lot like Balmer to me. Milking their existing product lines and introducing new products that just follow the competition.

Re:Why?

[uassholes]

No, it's about cheap labor. All kids are demanding access to electronics, they don't need coding classes for that.

tax money

[Gravis Zero]

It seems to me that the CEO of a company that's dodging taxes shouldn't quibble over how our taxes are spent.

Re:I'd argue we need moalready to mucre humanities

[dgatwood]

The schools are already busy teaching kids to be wimpy little fucks, and know-nothings. They don't need to be teaching "humanities" IMO.

That's sarcasm, right? I hope so. A shocking percentage of computer programmers are musicians (at least 3x as many as in the general population), and this correlation is not a coincidence. Music in the schools teaches skills that give students a leg up in math classes later, and also teaches them skills that make it easier for them to understand how to write code later.

And language skills are also important to learning CS. That's where we learn the basic concepts of grammar that we later build upon when learning about how compilers work.

And history teaches us to avoid making the same stupid mistakes time and time again, and thus greatly increases our chances of still being around to write software in a hundred years.

All of these skills are of vital importance to computer science. Learning science without learning the arts will get you a generation of people who can't program their way out of a paper bag, because they've never learned spatial skills by studying art and perspective, or learned how to create large works of art from a million tiny brush strokes; they've never learned how to see a symphony as a collection of tiny notes, each one equally important; they've never learned to simultaneously use both sides of their brain to precisely count the duration of notes while emotionally feeling how to express them dynamically; and so on.

So no, reducing humanities education is not the solution to the problem. It is the problem.

Re:What age did Tim Cook learn to program?

[ljw1004]

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.

In the UK in my generation, a large portion of kids learnt to program in 4th or 5th grade using "BBC B" computers and the "Logo" turtle graphics programming language. I think it was more common than not to have it connected via RS232 to a little turtle robot.

I myself volunteered to teach in India for a year back in 1992 and I taught my 9th and 10th graders Logo too. It was a HUGE enabling vehicle for them to be creative thinkers and problem solvers, more so than any of the other classes they were taking.

There are so many naysayers in these discussions who can only imagine a single intended outcome of "learn to code" which is that people will join the job market as coders. But it's far more than that...

Coding is the best classroom activity for developing a child's intellectual+logical problem solving skills (craft+shop is for developing their practical problem solving skills; literature+debate for developing their rhetorical problem solving skills).

Coding also enables them to be more intellectually adept participants in their society, by equipping them with the tools to make sense of the information-saturated world around them. They'll be able to whip up a spreadsheet to check their mortgage payments. They'll be able to scrape websites to make sense of a talking point, or just to have the autonomy to pick what media they consume rather than accepting what big media shovels down their throats.

Re: Why?

[prefec2]

Even if we had computing classes for 4th graders. It would not help. You cannot teach everybody coding. The kids will hate it. It could be even counter productive.

In the past they lured more people into CS courses at university. Most of these extra people drop out or switch to something else. CS is not for everyone. Like engineering and the sciences you need to have a specific mindset for it. If anything would help then it would be training those skills. But I doubt it would significantly increase the output of coders.

BTW in future we will need less coders, as more stuff will be generated automatically.

Re: Why?

[Bengie]

Describe a problem

Understanding the problem in order to describe it is the single hardest part of programming. 80% of programmers don't understand problems, they throw code at a problem and see if the customer thinks it solves the issue. Most programmers rarely understand how their own code works. I question how good automatic code generators can become because human language is a horrible language to describe problems. 7% of communications is verbal, 60% of knowledge cannot be described with human language. I'm not math wiz, but unless a computer can learn how to interpret body language and tone and read between the lines, the best someone can communicate with a computer via natural language is about 7% * 60% = 4.2%.

Unless humans magically become better at communication, automatic code generation is dead on arrival for all but the simplest of tasks.