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

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?

[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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.