Has The 'Hour of Code' Turned Into a Giant Corporate Infomercial? (theregister.co.uk)

It happens every December. During "Computer Science Education Week," schools around the world dedicate a special hour towards getting kids excited about programming. But theodp writes: With Microsoft, Apple, and Google vying for the opportunity to put their products in front of tens of millions of K-12 students, The Register's Andrew Orlowski opines that the Hour of Code is turning into a giant corporate infomercial for kids. "Parents, such as the late Steve Jobs, tend to ration their children's use of technology," notes Orlowski. "But would Jobs, who consistently praised the value of broad liberal arts, approve of an hour of [Microsoft] Minecraft? It's doubtful." Google, he adds, is keen on dishing out its VR headsets to students and, not to be undone, Apple is also muscling in with an hour of code [and offering free workshops at Apple Stores].
This year Microsoft is even introducing a special online 'Hour of Code' edition" of Minecraft, according to the article, which points out that last year 31 million schoolchildren just spent their "Hour of Code" playing Minecraft.

Comments

It didn't used to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it always rather felt that way...Look at us! Education! Mind Share!

Seriously?

[kenh]

Has The 'Hour of Code' Turned Into a Giant Corporate Infomercial?

Wasn't it always? Or did people really think that following a script actually imparted some insight into the world of programming?

Re:Seriously?

[narcc]

I don't see why it wouldn't. A lot of kids started off back in the 80's with type-in programs. A lot of the Hour of Code activities seem similar, but now augmented with helpful annotations. That seems like an improvement to me.

There's a strange belief here that learning to program ought be a painful rite of passage to weed out the undeserving. It used to just be a fun hobby the average kid could pick-up in a few days.

Re:Seriously?

[kenh]

There's a strange belief here that learning to program ought be a painful rite of passage to weed out the undeserving.

No, it's that it should be something a child is actually drawn to, not an activity forced down their throat to perform in lock-step with thirty other classmates.

It used to just be a fun hobby the average kid could pick-up in a few days.

But not in a scripted hour in a group activity led by a teacher with no idea what they are doing...

Re: Seriously?

[rgreenly]

so true!

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has Objective-C, Google has Go, Microsoft has .Net.

Choose your favorite one. Hope you chose the Microsoft one because Objective-C isn't used anywhere and Go is barely a couple years old and isn't used anywhere but Google.

Learn Java, then learn C++. Once you have both of those go and learn C# and Python. Now learn computer vision. Now learn machine learning. Now learn robotics. Now build a robot that can do everything you can do. Now become jobless.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, it worked for Obama. He became a "coder" after typing in a few instructions. He's so good at it that he's under consideration for a Nobel Prize in something.

Re:Seriously?

[0100010001010011]

Wasn't it always? Or did people really think that following a script actually imparted some insight into the world of programming?

Through the glasses of history you're you're overestimating what you did at that age or underestimating what a child at that age is able to do.

Now that I have kids I finally sat down and look at what I was doing at those ages. My first exposure programming was Hypertalk. The stuff that I did at that age didn't "impart some insight". It did teach me syntax, how to debug, etc. Then programming my TI-83, then my TI-89, then PHP, Matlab, Java, C, C++, Python with HTML, Perl and Javascript thrown in there at times.

Who knows how much farther I'd be in my "programming" If I had the opportunity to program in more than TI BASIC during high school. The point is to expose kids to what is available. (You know, kind of like we do with reading, writing, art, math, and everything else in school)

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmer, automate thyself!

Re:Seriously?

[MightyYar]

But how will a kid know if they are drawn to programming if it is never introduced? It's not like all 30 of those kids have parents doing that, or even a computer at home other than a tablet or smartphone.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

you again? please go away.

delete your account

Re: Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know that in 1986, long before the Internet was at the home, and before programming was a popular profession, thousands of now grey-haired slashtards like me looked at a computer and thought "how do I make my own game?" And then picked up a book from the box or the library and made it happen. I didn't need my parents to shove it down my throat, and would have rebelled if they had. I didn't need a school to torture me with stupid boring bullshit. I rebelled against that too. However, a C64 and a book and I was in business. Even worse, I had a commodore, and the only magazine at the library was for the Apple II so I had to port the games. Somehow, it worked, though my code still looks like a flowchart instead of objects. Believe it or not, young one, children can learn how to code on their own, just fine.

Software architecture, however, must be learned though blood, tears, sweat, screaming and sadomasichism.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a strange belief here that learning to program ought be a painful rite of passage to weed out the undeserving.

If you have to try, you probably shouldn't be doing it. At least not professionally.

It used to just be a fun hobby the average kid could pick-up in a few days.

Don't let a jerk like me tell you not to do what you enjoy.

80% of people who try taking programming at a college level, fail in the first two semesters
20% of those who don't immediately fail will eventually fail and not graduate with the major
50% of those who actually make it to graduation "should not be programming", to paraphrase some of the world's leading CS teachers who have been trying to make learning CS easier for decades, working with some of the best and trying everything.
Of the 8% students who can actually program, their abilities are distributed on a power-curve where 80% of them are below average.

For some, programming requires virtually zero effort, it is a natural extension of the way they have always thought. When I was 6 years old, I remember the first time I saw a computer. I thought it was a TV. The computer was showing a screensaver. I asked person at the electronics fair why they wasted a tape to record what was playing. He told me it was a computer and that it was computing the images in real-time. I was instantly hooked. I asked him what a computer was. He said it was like a fast calculator.

I remember standing there wracking my brain thinking about how I would create an animation with a calculator. I quickly came to the conclusion that the colors must be represented with numbers because calculators only work with numbers. But then I also realized that the number have to be stored somewhere in order to remember the last pattern. rinse and repeat. After a few minutes of elated delirium, I essentially fully understood how a computer worked.

At this point I really wanted to learn how to program computers. Unfortunately we did not own a computer and we were quite destitute. It wasn't until several years later, and some lucky promotions for my dad, that we got a computer. I then asked for a book to learn programming. My dad purchased me a book about Basic. I hated it, I remember throwing a temper-tantrum. I yelled at him saying that computers can't know English, they use numbers. I wanted to know the programming language computers used. He got me a book on ASM. I read it front to back in a few days. ASM was pretty much exactly how I envisioned a computer worked. I fiddled around with a bit of ASM and got bored, it was no longer a challenge.

I asked my dad if there were any other programming languages than Basic, that made the work of programming easier. He got me a book on C. I quickly read that and fell in love with C. It was low enough that I would think of what ASM it was generating, but high enough to remove the mundane parts of programming in ASM. But again I quickly got bored.

A decade later, I was in college with only a few days of coding experience. I pretty much aced every class with zero effort. By the time I graduated, I had maybe a few weeks of programming experience from college. I quickly landed my first programming job and immediately started writing multi-threaded programs. I quickly became know for writing programs with virtually zero bugs and were very fast.

Programming has always been trivial for me. I love it because I am only limited by my ability to think. I am constantly perplexed why anyone has any difficulty with it. It works exactly how you think it would work, pure logic, following every instruction perfectly (in most cases). Almost the only reason something does not work as expected is because my model of how I thought it worked was incorrect. I fix my model and move on.

I am the go-to guy for non-reproducible bugs. Bugs also follow logic, even extreme corner cases or rare race-conditions. Why is your code running slowly even though yo

Re: Seriously?

[MightyYar]

And yet you still had a C64. I think I'm probably the same age as you, by the way, based on your timeline. For me it was an Apple IIe and it was 1984. But my parents bought that because it is what they had at my school (and an upgrade from the II+ my dad used at work). My parents were awesome and got me computer magazines (with the programs to type in by hand...) to support my habit. There are a substantial number of kids with XBoxes, smartphones, and tablets, but you wouldn't believe how many households have no computer. The mind boggles at what fun we could have had with a $149 Chromebook in developer mode back in the mid 80s... :)

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about the Amish? I see people on welfare getting their smartphones 100% covered. You can purchase a new computer for $16 +s/h. The single most important part of a programmer is their quest for knowledge. If you can't self-teach, you will never be better than gutter trash. Why? Because anyone who can't teach themselves will never be better than their teachers and teachers are horrible. CS department chair said "The problem with finding teachers for CS is teaching is the second choice for those who can't survive in the real world. If you apply for teaching, you're not good enough to teach." Good programmers are already incredibly rare, but now you want someone who can program and teach? They are the unicorns of unicorns.

Re:Seriously?

[Oligonicella]

Using your logic only; explain how *I* became drawn to programming at a time when there were *NO* courses for such anywhere but in college and votech, the general public was almost completely ignorant of them, you would have to purchase a business computer because home computers, tablets and smartphones didn't exist.

Re:Seriously?

[MightyYar]

The affordability of technology is not in question - almost all of these kids have an X-Box, tablet, and smartphone. But think back to your first computer, I'll use a C64 as an example - it was essentially a piece of garbage. You turned it on and it did nothing. Even if you had software, you had to know the magical commands to make it chooch. Turning it on made it just blink a cursor. Your natural curiosity made you type other things besides the magical commands that loaded "River Raid". You learned other magical commands. You recorded random shit to the tape deck and played it back on the stereo.

Now pretend you instead got an X-Box. You put a disk in and start playing a game. There's nothing to screw with outside of the game (in fact, it's pretty locked down). Smart phones and tablets have great fuck-around factor, but you need a PC to program them. Even if you just play with online programming, you really need at least a bluetooth keyboard unless you want to go nuts. But most importantly, there is no natural path to discovering the low level. You are presented with only the high level and there is never even a hint or a peak at the underbelly of the beast unless someone points it out to you. There is no enigmatic blinking cursor.

I'm obviously not suggesting that "hour of code" will do the same as a blinking cursor, but it might just be the only hint of the inner workings that some of these kids get. Maybe one or two of them pester their parents for a $149 Chromebook instead of the newest Madden.

Re:Seriously?

[Oligonicella]

They last damn person on earth I want teaching programming is a K-12 teacher. Do you seriously want programming to fall under the umbrella of the same people who have embraced fuzzy math and other "new" educational concepts? Do you want programming degrading in quality at the accelerated rate that reading, writing, art, math, and everything else taught in school has been?

Re:Seriously?

[0100010001010011]

Where did people earning PhDs in Math first learn Math?

Re:Seriously?

[110010001000]

Also, nowadays it is much harder to write software that is interesting. Back in the olden days I wrote games and my games were semi-close to what you could get commercially. Simply because programming was much easier back then and commercial games were written usually by a single dude anyway. Nowadays kids aren't going to be impressed by games they make themselves, because they will compare them to the $50-million-budget games you can get at Best Buy.

Re: Seriously?

[thinkwaitfast]

I had an Atari800. Wanted an apple, but it was 4x as much. And my parents were strongly opposed to me having a computer, I had to pay for it myself.
Do you know how hard it is for a 10 year old kid to come up with $800 ($2000 in 2016 inflated money)? But I did. And it still took a lot of convincing them to both let me buy it and then to let me use it.

Supercomputers are given away today in cereal boxes and kids complain about how hard they have it....

Re:Seriously?

[thinkwaitfast]

I have a BS in math and I still don't know it. It is in applied math and while I'm good at solving and understanding engineering math problems, I never got the hang of proofs, I think mostly because I had not interest in it. If the engine started and ran to specifications, that is all the proof that I required.

Re: Seriously?

[TechyImmigrant]

It was an Apple ][+ starting at age 9 for me. My 11th birthday present was a copy of Rodney Zacks programming the 6502 (imported from the USA). I still have it.

I believe the immediacy of basic and the simplicity of 8 bit machine code was effective at drawing people in.

Re:Seriously?

[TechyImmigrant]

Where did people earning PhDs in Math first learn Math?

In the case of my family, from my wife the K-12 teacher (back then - she since went back to college and got a PhD). Having a grown child with a PhD in math is rather handy.

The idea that current teachers have adopted fuzzy math and new concepts is complete bullshit. They are caught in a repetitive swing cycle between procedural teaching and learning through problem solving. This has been going on for a century, back forth. Teaching underlying principles that parents never understood is what opens the path to higher mathematical thinking and what leads parents to post math homework questions that they don't know enough math to answer themselves because they got the procedural method.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

But how will a kid know if they are drawn to programming if it is never introduced? It's not like all 30 of those kids have parents doing that, or even a computer at home other than a tablet or smartphone.

Back in the autumn of 1982 my high school mathematics teacher brought his personal Commodore PET computer into the classroom and integrated it into the curriculum for a particular section of our lectures. We each had to type in a short (20-lines or so) programme written in Commodore PET BASIC to perform some computations for an assignment. Of the 36 students I was the only person bitten by the "programmer bug" which began as a hobby and later morphed into a career made easier by my ability to develop software of various kinds in a multitude of languages, although I was never a programmer in the sense of job title..

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

The single most important part of a programmer is their quest for knowledge. If you can't self-teach, you will never be better than gutter trash.

I concur based on professional experience and as a life-long learner now involved in data science. The courses that I take are riddled with learners who exhibit an utter lack of curiosity, self-sufficiency, and willingness to learn unless spoon-fed the solutions. When someone has no initiative to at least make an effort to find an answer to their own questions, instead immediately posting a message in a course forum or asking in-person, I feel disinclined to respond. To this day, over 40 years later, my curiosity pushes me to learn new things as well as revisit previous subjects, technologies, methods, and techniques. Yes, I prefer working at the command-line using vi/vim to develop scripts and programmes whilst staring at a glowing green font displayed on a black background. I enjoy mentoring although I expect self-discipline from those whom I mentor in the workplace or educational/professional development venues.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no enigmatic blinking cursor.

I'm obviously not suggesting that "hour of code" will do the same as a blinking cursor, but it might just be the only hint of the inner workings that some of these kids get. Maybe one or two of them pester their parents for a $149 Chromebook instead of the newest Madden.

To learn the inner workings of a computer all anyone needs is a reference manual for the CPU microprocessor, a computer with the same CPU matching the reference manual, and ideally an assembler/disassembler to make it easier to develop software. FreeDOS and the debug utility can be used in a pinch if the person is willing to put in the extra effort. I wrote a very small, yet functional for its intended purposes, operating system purely in assembly language using the MS-DOS debug utility years ago. My first foray into assembly language was with a Commodore VIC-20, the Tinymon utility typed from a book, and the Commodore VIC-20 Programmer's Reference Manual. It was not until later that I bought the books and disks for the LADS assembler and disassembler as a precursor to buying the Commodore VICMON cartridge. There was something exciting about controlling the Commodore Datasette Unit via assembly language.

Re:Seriously?

[kenh]

It's not like all 30 of those kids have parents doing that, or even a computer at home other than a tablet or smartphone.

Think about it - those thirty kids are all sitting in a classroom with computers for their "Hour of Coding" (TM) - access to a computer isn't the barrier.

Before the internet people programmed their home computers because it was the only way to do anything with them - with the internet any number of apps/games can be downloaded onto their phone, tablet, computer...

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately we did not own a computer and we were quite destitute. It wasn't until several years later, and some lucky promotions for my dad, that we got a computer. I then asked for a book to learn programming. My dad purchased me a book about Basic. I hated it, I remember throwing a temper-tantrum. I yelled at him saying that computers can't know English, they use numbers.

Your daddy should have put you over his knee and disciplined you with a leather belt before taking the computer from you. I was in high school when I bought my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, that was on sale for almost CAD500.00 with the money saved delivering newspapers on a part-time basis. I received, from my parents, the Commodore Datasette Unit for my birthday at the same time so I could save programmes and reload them. I subsequently bought books with my own money so I could learn more advanced BASIC and later 6502 Assembly Language and Machine Code. I still have the computer and all of the accessories and books.

Re:Seriously?

[Bing Tsher E]

50% of those who actually make it to graduation "should not be programming", to paraphrase some of the world's leading CS teachers who have been trying to make learning CS easier for decades, working with some of the best and trying everything.

Said 'leading CS teachers' should not be programming. But that's a pretty redundant point of view, because they AREN'T programming. Except little sandbox exercises from their Ivory Towers.

Re:Seriously?

[Hognoxious]

Perhaps you just enjoyed making holes in cards?

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before I even had a computer or ever touched a computer, I had spent hours every day thinking about how programming would probably be if I had one. By the time I got a computer, programming was trivial and boring. I felt like I learned very little. That is the beauty of programming, you don't even need a computer, you can just think about the problem. Now that I have been professionally programming for a decade, my stance has not changed. I spend most of my time thinking rather than doing.

Programming is nearly 100% mental work, this is why I love it. By the time I reached college, I had spent maybe a week "programming", but over a decade of thinking. Lots and lots and lots of thinking. When my co-workers wonder how I pick up so quickly on new technology or intuitively solve what they consider hard to impossible problems, it's because I have nearly 2 decades of constantly thinking about hypothetical problems that I made up in my own mind and solved them in my mind. No computer required.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

OP - I was a pretty quiet child that almost never got into trouble, but I do have a few memories of me doing something that I wish I could go back in time and give myself a stern lesson. I wish I didn't have to randomly rehash doing something so stupid.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's that it should be something a child is actually drawn to, not an activity forced down their throat to perform in lock-step with thirty other classmates.

Just like math, science and English.

Re: Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gone are the days when access to main memory took less than a single CPU clock cycle...

Re:Seriously?

[ShakaUVM]

>No, it's that it should be something a child is actually drawn to, not an activity forced down their throat to perform in lock-step with thirty other classmates.

Why single out computer science here? Why mandate English, math, science, etc. for students?

Because the sad reality is that a student has to apply for a major in college *prior to taking classes at that college*. So they need to be exposed to every subject they might be interested in in the K-12 system, and maybe they don't know that they'll like or dislike a subject until they actually take it.

Most people who become biology majors like biology in high school. Most physics majors took physics in high school and thought it was something they could do.

Most computer science freshmen go into CS because they like video games.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretend statistics and the +2 only goes to show that 2 mods are dumb enough to believe your bullshit.

No one else does, with the exception of those predisposed to believe the bullshit you're promoting with your pretend statistics.

Re: Seriously?

[TechyImmigrant]

Gone are the days when access to main memory took less than a single CPU clock cycle...

On PCs this is true. But I regularly engage on an engineering level with CPUs with single cycle memory access. They're part of the fabric of things these days.

Re:Seriously?

[rtb61]

The failure is nothing more complex than shitty coding lanaguges pushed out by corporations to favour their profits and not concerted industry and government coalition to design the best possible coding langauage, taking into proper account existing english and maths langauge. Why will it not happen for decades more, sheer insensate corporate greed, greed that knows no bounds and demands more for ever. My god what a pile of shit the english language and maths would be if designed by modern corporations, hundreds of copyrighted and patented variants, tossed out regularly to charge for upgrades.

Re:Seriously?

[MightyYar]

Agree 100%. All of those kids have access to insane supercomputer hardware by 80s standards. But there is no enigmatic blinking cursor...

Re:Seriously?

[MightyYar]

Using my logic only? You had some other path. I can deduce that it wasn't "hour of code", but that's all I've got.

Re: Seriously?

[bickerdyke]

Supercomputers are given away today in cereal boxes and kids complain about how hard they have it....

no, they dont complain. which is part of the problem.

as long as facebook and instasnap are running on their phones, they are fine.

with a c64 or any other computer back at the days, you couldnt do anything without putting some effort or creativity in.

as a poster said two posts up, we asked oursekves: how can we make our own games? THAT is was no one does anymore. computers became the new TVs, consuming pre made software

Re: Seriously?

[thomn8r]

s/1986/1981/g

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are the building blocks of everything. CS is not a building block. Phy-Ed is something you teach children, you don't force all of the children on a Foot Ball team. And dumbing it down doesn't help either. It saps all of the enjoyment for the children who will be good at CS and makes those who can't do CS get a false sense of accomplishment. The only thing worse than starving is being fed spoiled food that sickens you.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit is having to deal with people that have spent years specializing, are nationally recognized as being some of the "best" in their field, and I have to constantly correct them. Why is that? Why are the best so "dumb" in their own fields? I am not the only one like this. It is infuriating.

When I worked as a student at my University, I was constantly mistaken by professors to have been working for a masters in their domain.

I recently noticed that one of my co-workers, who graduated from MIT, was getting a little annoyed when I some-times rabbit trailed in discussion. So I confronted him and asked him in what way does the think I help him the most, so I can focus on those points and not annoy him so much. He said he asks me for help because of my super-human attention to detail and my ability to intuitively quickly debug difficult problems and seemingly instantly notice problems in the code or design before they happen. Probably related to my "super human" attention to detail.

If you've ever worked with me, you would quickly find out I have several learning disabilities, along with issues remembering stuff. I have an issue with short-term memory, forgetting most things that I have learned in a minute. To work around this, I have spent decades sharpening my logic skills. I don't have to remember almost anything if I can use logic to recreate the information I have forgotten. They key to this is I need to consistently think the same way and I have to understand how I think.

Pretend you can't remember almost anything. So when you see something that you should know, all you can do is think to yourself "How would I solve this issue, including almost every implementation detail?". Then you proceed to solve the issue almost as if you have never seen it before. This is what I do all the time, except I do it so fast that others think I actually have an incredibly strong memory. It's not that, I just have very consistent and fast logic.

There are many people better than me. I've worked with many. There is so much more for me to get better with.

No question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised the title is a question when even the excerpt does a good enough job of answering the question.

With all of these companies creating new languages and tightening up their ecosystems, the competition is on for schools of thought.

They should go back to basic(s)...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had more fun trying to squeeze 64k worth of basic code into a self made lottery number generator on a TRS-80 than anything else coding. I learned a lot more doing that than playing some stupid game.
10 cls
20 print All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
30 goto 20

Re:They should go back to basic(s)...

[kenh]

10 cls
20 print All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
30 goto 20

Quick, spot the syntax error...

Should be:

10 cls
20 print "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
30 goto 20

Re:They should go back to basic(s)...

[mark-t]

Or for more fun, in 80 column mode it should be

10 cls
20 print "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."; string$(36," ");
30 goto 20

Re:They should go back to basic(s)...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering if I should have put quotation marks in there. It's only been about 30 years since I played with basic. The real fun was trimming the code to fit 64k, and using a rng with a dataset of 47 numbers that removed each number picked before running the next six rng's on the dataset, and only 2 string values were allowed. In the end I could actually visualize the running code in my head and it made sense.

The "hour" or "week" thing is flawed.

[jpellino]

It's like having "book hour" or "music hour" once a year. At our school the kids get 2 periods per week for tech (straight coding, sure, or movie making, or web, or animation or embedding code into robotics, or Arduino or AR or etc...) and then can articulate that with other subjects. One hour is barely even inspiring, especially if there is not a structure to keep it going, and in this case history repeats: IIRC Seymour Papert said having a computer in every classroom back in the 80s was like having one piece of toilet paper in each room of your house. It's not hurting anything per se but it's a lot more useful if brought together in the right time and place.

Re: The "hour" or "week" thing is flawed.

[Anonymous Coward]

one hour is more than none (what most schools offer), the point is to offer at least initial exposure to get kids / teachers inspired to learn more.

Re: The "hour" or "week" thing is flawed.

[jpellino]

Any sign that it's working? If they only offer that one hour per year what do they do next? With no followup the kids will be teased with something they can't do in their school. The old line about kids asking about math - "Will we ever use this?" is mild compared to "Hey kids! Here's something you could use to make six figures and change the world! Now, run along. We'll give you "what most schools offer" - nothing - plus another hour of it a year from now!" As for teachers, when the first teacher nets were rolled out decades ago, TENet being one of the most robust first ones, they found that most of the teachers went online and average of 20 min a day in the first year, and it was mostly from home - as they didn't have 20 minutes to spare inside the school day. The idea that teachers will somehow find a way to shoehorn meaningful tech learning into their classrooms without standards or curriculum is not a reliable path forward.

Re: The "hour" or "week" thing is flawed.

[Anonymous Coward]

one hour is more than none (what most schools offer), the point is to offer at least initial exposure to get kids / teachers inspired to learn more.

Today students have the world's library at their fingertips. There is no reason they cannot learn the basics of computer programming, be it a mobile application, a web application, or a more traditional computer programme or script. I wish I had had access to such a vast body of knowledge back in 1983.

Mindcraft

[ledow]

Companies like this have no idea how to educate your child. That's not what they are interested in. Participation in the hour of code stuff is pure brand building. Look, kids, you can play Minecraft on your school iPads thanks to Microsoft! Google it now!

As someone who's worked their entire professional career in school IT, a shocking number of companies have no idea what education actually is or how it works or what's needed. RPi was a great example. Throw the device at kids with absolutely no educational content ready, nothing to give to teachers to aid them along, and don't even bother to come to educational conferences, just let others sell it for you on the basis of a name.

I don't know a single school that has more than a couple of them, and they are rarely used for anything but the default image, "load up Scratch, wasn't that cool?, right back to work".

If you think you're going to teach teenagers coding by using Scratch and Minecraft (which, admittedly, has logic circuits etc.) then you're sadly failing a generation whose parents were using BBC BASIC on the ONE computer in their school when they were 8/9. Seriously, even something like TIS-100 or SpaceChem does more for problem solving, logic constraints and the coding mindset than Scratch and similar (which is basically drag-drop-flow-chart, which we used to call "Control", not programming).

My school have the Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer devices, same problem. The curriculum content covered is minimal, most of it is left in the hands of the teacher, so you get a single example project that they make themselves familiar with, every kid does it the same, builds it the same, loads up the same example code, and apart from the real outliers that tinker on their own, nobody learns anything.

As a coder, a mathematician, there is nothing scarier than how little of how the computer actually works is taught in schools. Because the teacher's don't know either. I've worked in dozens of schools over the years and met dozens of IT teachers and primary school teachers who are required to teach IT. I've met precisel three teachers I'd trust to write a program - one a mathematics teacher who programmed in COBOL in a previous one, one a former industrial control specialist who went into teaching, the other my brother who teaches physics but studied maths in uni and was taught FORTRAN.

With the exception of the industrial control guy, not ONE of the IT teachers I've met or worked with has a clue about programming or how to program or would even get an XKCD or Dilbert joke about coders or similar. I wouldn't trust any of them to build a machine, network a room, or anything else. And that's worrying because that means they are not "Computer Science", they are "Computing". An end-user, not a creator.

Sure, they can teach the kids to do silly things in Scratch and knock up an assessment sheet in Excel, but anything more than that and you wouldn't want them near it.

And those are the people TEACHING the specialist subject of IT that - in the UK - is required to be a part of teaching in all subjects.

My teachers, back in my day, had no IT equipment, experience, or knowledge. And they did a better job because they knew it was the future and knew it was vital and they learned it and made us.

Nowadays, everything is computing so as long as you're proficient with a bit of typing and know where the print button is in Word when the teacher loses you, you're a genius.

I help run after-school clubs targeting coding, in an exclusive private school. We've had hundreds of top-class pupils comes through our doors. I've met precisely one who stood a chance of being a half-decent coder. All the others think that pressing F12 in Chrome and changing the local cached HTML front page of BBC News to read "Fred Bloggs is a Wally" is "hacking".

People just don't code nowadays. And Microsoft et al have no intention to teach them, because it keeps them as MS's mercy. They will never understand how si

Re:Mindcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't teach kids how computers work because of one dirty little secret:

"Most industry professionals don't know how they work either."

Sure, I can tell you some of the principles that drove the early x86 chips and the venerable 6502 but chip technology has advanced so far now that most of that stuff is irrelevant. A handful of companies, if put together, might be able to build up a reasonable picture of what's going on - the rest of us don't stand a chance. Also, all this information is top secret intellectual property that you can never get. Sorry bub.

If you're being smart then you teach kids about open source software, ARM processors (at the most) or OpenRISC and open source hardware solutions. Do that and you can ACTUALLY show them how it's built and how it works. Teaching closed hardware/software solutions is stupid.

The downside of open source is that there's a ton of misleading information and opinion pieces out there. Most of the art of learning open source is about learning not to learn the irrelevant and broken stuff. The other thing to learn is that extrapolating the practice of open source will lead to a myriad of broken solutions unless software sprawl is controlled. Learn that open source exacerbates this problem and cannot solve it. Become bitter over time. Retire knowing that you could never solve anything because someone could always fork something more broken and put a fancy flashing logo on it. Realize the whole industry is about selling dancing monkeys with embedded malware.

Re:Mindcraft

[0100010001010011]

My teachers, back in my day, had no IT equipment, experience, or knowledge. And

And back in your teachers' teachers' day they didn't have HVAC, indoor bathrooms or know about anything that had been invented after they came along.

All the others think that pressing F12 in Chrome and changing the local cached HTML front page of BBC News to read "Fred Bloggs is a Wally" is "hacking"

And? 90% of the code I use when I first start a language is copy and paste. Not everyone learns through composition, some of us learn by decomposing something else.

Re: Mindcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

We call those people hackers and send them to jail. ;)

Re:Mindcraft

[thegarbz]

RPi was a great example

If you think the RPi was an example then you fundamentally don't understand what the Raspberry Pi Foundation is. They aren't there to educate anyone, they are just there to enable. The education component was always supposed to come from elsewhere.

If you think you're going to teach teenagers coding

And now you're demonstrating that you don't understand the purpose of the Hour of Code either. That is responsible for getting people interested in something. Again education comes from elsewhere.

At least you're spot on about the teachers.

Re:Mindcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't teach kids how computers work because of one dirty little secret:

"Most industry professionals don't know how they work either."

From a programmer's perspective, since von Neumann, computers fetch instructions from memory and execute them. Everything else is hardware optimizations to make them execute more instructions per second or to increase storage capacity.

Processors/processor cores, cache consistency, and distributed systems complicate things a bit, but only for multi-processor shared-state programs.

Re:Mindcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think we should be making students into programmers, but just showing them the basic concepts of how a computer works. Using any programming language can at least help them to understand that computers are not these sentient intelligent beings that some kids think they are, but that they have to be programmed by real human people.

the problem is in the market.

[nimbius]

You dont spend 45 years teaching people to mindlessly consume technology and then suddenly expect them to become software engineers. These are the same multinational corporations that have fought hard against hacker culture with everything from the 'dont copy that floppy' campaign to DMCA takedowns and international raids against "suspected hackers." These are the same people that led a witch hunt against Aaron Schwartz for his 'hour of code.' The same corporations that insist their source is sacrosanct, their licenses indelible, and their "intellectual property" unquestionable. many would argue they are the least qualified, if at all capable, of ensuring a future america can write so much as a hello world.

Minecraft is slowly rearing its head as one of microsofts worst decisions. Yes it had a lot of users, but not a lot of new users. sure, you can create logic engines in it, but the average 11 year old on minecraft isnt doing that. Notch walked away with the bulk of minecrafts real profit, leaving microsoft to shepherd servers and find new ways to milk a cow he gave up on years ago after the food mechanic. the MS deal alienated a lot of hackers/coders who enjoyed writing mods for the platform and saw it as just another thing gobbled up by redmond to be slowly bled dry through incompetent mismanagement.

Re:the problem is in the market.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"the MS deal alienated a lot of hackers/coders who enjoyed writing mods for the platform and saw it as just another thing gobbled up by redmond to be slowly bled dry through incompetent mismanagement."

Pretty much everything Redmond touches turns to shit. I'm hard pressed to name something they've touched that hasn't, frankly.

Re:the problem is in the market.

[Opportunist]

Pretty much everything any large corporation touches turns to shit. Think EA and the various studios and franchises it bought and squeezed the last drop out of. Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog... how many more.

As soon as something is big enough to raise the interest of a large corporation, it will be bought and rest assured that it will not survive this for long. Anything that exists only because there are modders and plugin writers that contribute for free will not survive the takeover by a corporation that wants to replace those free mods with for-pay DLC.

Because the people who flock to those things are there exactly because those things are modable, hackable and tweakable.

Re:the problem is in the market.

[dj245]

Minecraft is slowly rearing its head as one of microsofts worst decisions. Yes it had a lot of users, but not a lot of new users. sure, you can create logic engines in it, but the average 11 year old on minecraft isnt doing that. Notch walked away with the bulk of minecrafts real profit, leaving microsoft to shepherd servers and find new ways to milk a cow he gave up on years ago after the food mechanic. the MS deal alienated a lot of hackers/coders who enjoyed writing mods for the platform and saw it as just another thing gobbled up by redmond to be slowly bled dry through incompetent mismanagement.

Sometimes a fad product is just a fad. Minecraft was a great game, but only because it had a novel idea at the right time. It's not a particularly clever idea or even a patentable one. Seeing Microsoft invest so much is analogous to Target purchasing Ty (beanie baby company).

Re:the problem is in the market.

[antdude]

MS hardwares like mice, joysticks, etc.?

Re:the problem is in the market.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

MS hardwares like mice, joysticks, etc.?

I could be wrong, but I don't think they originated those up by buying another company that made them.

That said, I think most of the hardware MS puts out is fairly decent. Not great, but decent.

Any software they acquire, on the other hand, is an almost certain "lets make it suck" saga.

Re:the problem is in the market.

[LienRag]

Well, there's Minetest now...

Go dig

[Anonymous Coward]

From a gamergate information archive floating around the net:

Code.org was behind the Hour of Code program.

2013 form 990: http://990s.foundationcenter.o...

Board members:

* Hadi Partovi - President / CEO https://archive.is/WP9ge
* Bradford Smith - probably Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel https://archive.is/cY9MF
* Margaret Johnson - Director of Education and University Relations for Google. https://archive.is/8niRU G+: https://archive.is/MBTqY
* Robert Schnabel - possibly the Dean of Informatics at Indiana University and Chair of the Education Policy Committee at the Association for Computing Machinery http://www.computinginthecore....
* Robert Runcie - Superintendent of Public Schools at Broward County, Florida; put a programming course in every high school in the county http://articles.sun-sentinel.c...
* Cameron Wilson - Secretary / COO - former Director of Public Policy for the ACM
* Michelle Page - Treasurer - https://archive.is/twUCh
* Pat Yongradit - Director of education - high school CS teacher http://patyongpradit.com/ whose students outcompete university students http://blog.acthompson.net/201...
* James Gwertzman - Chief evangelist. Formerly of PopCap and Microsoft. https://archive.is/xm37B

fwd.us and code.org possibly founded by Microsoft to fabricate news of a shortage of tech workers to justify k-12 tech spending and increased h1b immigration
Brookings meeting September 27 2012 talked about manufacturing a crisis. Brad Smith is General Counsel Microsoft
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... https://archive.is/yuN6A

stonemirror, SJW keyboard warrior, is funded through Hour of Code
http://theralphretort.com/ston... https://archive.is/Ma1fs
http://liberating-software.org... https://archive.is/WtBi7

Re: Go dig

[Anonymous Coward]

.. Sorry to burst your bubble, but just because some random guy you're bullying on Twitter hosted his own local 'hour of code' event doesn't mean that he was 'funded through hour of code'.. anyone is allowed to host their own event for free, on their own.

YES

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Has The 'Hour of Code' Turned Into a Giant Corporate Infomercial?"

Yes, for fuck's sake. Yes it has turned Into a giant corporate infomercial. If Apple or Microsoft or Google are involved, the answer is "yes".

Stop asking these dumbass questions with embarrassingly obvious answers.

Re:YES

[Imrik]

I think the answer is actually no. The phrase "turned into" implies that it wasn't always.

Steve Jobs - Parent role model ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: "Parents, such as the late Steve Jobs, tend to ration their children's use of technology, but would Jobs ... approve of an hour of [Microsoft] Minecraft?"
A: Who gives a fuck. How much of an Apple fanboy do you have to be to even be looking to Steve Jobs for parenting advice ?

Re:Steve Jobs - Parent role model ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya Steve was a great role model for parenting. If your trying to deny paternity.

What hasn't now?

[gearloos]

The internet has turned into nothing but an advertisers dream. From being capable of tracking your every move to pushing targeted info to you, this thing was made to take your money, or try to.(not even including the spam that's served up to you by the more nefarious groups) Compare search results from now and say even only ten years ago for most topics and the results now are probably not much other than retail offers for the first few pages and at times it's even tough to sift through it to actually find what you're looking for. I guess my point is that everything on the net is a sales tactic in disguise so why would the hour of code be any different?

Microsoft should be banned

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft should be banned if their idea of education is to get a kid hooked on their game.

um 1980 called

[Anonymous Coward]

it wants its 300 baud commodore vic 20 back

Begs the question

[argStyopa]

Has it "turned into" implies that it wasn't basically that from the start.

The idea that every kid should know how to code is stupid. The majority of people in the developed world, much less the REST of the world, can get on comfortably through their entire lives never knowing a line of code.

There's too many things people already need to know (that they generally don't) to waste time advancing such a narrow agenda.

Re:Begs the question

[SeaFox]

There's too many things people already need to know (that they generally don't) to waste time advancing such a narrow agenda.

They should have an "Hour of Home Finances" instead. And teach people how to balance their checkbook and create a household budget.

Re:Begs the question

[argStyopa]

There wouldn't be an 'abundance' if EVERY KID IN THE WORLD knew how to code, would there?

Already, US coders are unhappy about the legions of immigrants (or simply foreign-seated coders) willing to do their jobs for 1/3 or less the salary. You think teaching every kid to code would improve that situation?

Infomercial

[fluffernutter]

Large companies are allowed to get the focus of school year kids and you think they won't advertise? Wow, just wow. Next we'll hear that Trump is milking the American public for all they are worth!

40M Kids Sat Through Disney-Branded HOC Tutorials

[theodp]

"The Disney 2016 tutorial, Moana: Wayfinding with Code, will bring the Hour of Code to students around the world for Computer Science Education Week and beyond!," exclaims the Disney Hour of Code Digital Toolkit. "Since 2014, The Walt Disney Company has worked with Code.org to build Hour of Code tutorials featuring Disney characters that inspire kids of all ages to try coding. Disney and Code.org's 2014 Hour of Code tutorial featured Anna and Elsa from Frozen and in 2015 the tutorial featured Rey, BB-8, Princess Leia and R2-D2 from The Force Awakens. Since that time, over 40 million students have tried Disney coding tutorials." Like Microsoft, the Hour of Code has apparently been very good to Disney branding. In 2014, after starring in a signature Hour of Code tutorial used to "teach President Obama to code", Disney Princesses Elsa and Anna went on to dethrone tech-shamed Barbie as the most popular girls' holiday season toy.

coding minecraft, not playing.

[B.Stolk]

>just spent their "Hour of Code" playing Minecraft.

This is absolute bull.
My 6yo daughter enjoyed code.org sessions, PROGRAMMING minecraft characters with for loops, if statements and such.
Not playing it.
There is a difference.

The minecraft lessons were really well done, with intermezzo's of Mojang programmers explaining stuff in videos.
It get's a thumbs up from this parent, at least.

You are missing the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the point.