Google-Funded Project Envisions Nation's Librarians Teaching Kids to Code (ala.org)

"We're excited to double down on the findings of Ready to Code 1," says one Google program manager, "by equipping librarians with the knowledge and skills to cultivate computational thinking and coding skills in our youth." theodp writes: Citing the need to fill "500,000 current job openings in the field of computer science," the American Library Association argues in a new whitepaper that "all 115,000 of the nation's school and public libraries are crucial community partners to guarantee youth have skills essential to future employment and civic participation"... The ALA's Google-funded "Libraries Ready to Code" project has entered Phase II, which aims to "equip Master's in Library Science students to deliver coding programs through public and school libraries and foster computational thinking skills among the nation's youth."

"Libraries play a vital role in our communities, and Google is proud to build on our partnership with ALA," added Hai Hong, who leads US outreach on Google's K-12 Education team... "Given the ubiquity of technology and the half-a-million unfilled tech jobs in the country, we need to ensure that all youth understand the world around them and have the opportunity to develop the essential skills that employers -- and our nation's economy -- require."

Comments

Better to spend on education than salaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate America sees a problem: not enough computer programmers, and a solution: teach people programming.

If salaries went up, along with job security, many self-starting adults would seek out the education they need to make that money. But we can't have THAT!

But without that, it doesn't matter how much education you do...once people learn the reality of the industry they will jump right out of it.

Them's the facts.

Re:Better to spend on education than salaries

[0100010001010011]

You are equating 'computer programmers' with 'people that can program'. A huge number of professions would benefit from people being able to script up something to reduce their work load.

There are companies still doing books in Excel by hand (not relying on any of Excel's built in functions). I helped someone in the mid 2000s that didn't know you could Sort or Uniquify a list in Excel.

It's not about making computer programmers it's about graduating engineers that can program, accountants that can program, MBAs that can program.

A long time ago not everyone learned to type. There were typists that were employed to type in what someone else came up with. Along the way someone got the idea that you could teach people to type and that typists would no longer be needed outside of some specific jobs. The same thing is happening right now with coding.

Source: I'm a Mechanical Engineer that mashes the keyboard to get my job done.

Re:Better to spend on education than salaries

[Anonymous Coward]

I have at this point in my life worked on about 10 large projects. Thousands of man hours poured into them. All did decently and made the companies millions. Well over 300k people were using it at one point. Not one line of code is still in use. The only things that are still being used is by me because I do not need to re-write them at this time. But they probably will be at some point.

Code is eferial. It is transient. It leaves like a ghost never to be seen again. I can see why companies want to minimize the cost of that.

They will find however that just because everyone knows how to program does not mean everyone can do it. I am a very experienced at it and even I still have trouble with it. It takes time and solitude to do correctly. Instead we are trying to force creative art style bullpit design into it. So you get in the zone and are yanked out quickly because the dude 2 tables over has decided to have a conversation with 3 other people. Most people can do 1 thing at a time pretty well. Give them 2 things and they will do 2 things very badly. One thing that struck me when I first started doing this was how quiet most programming environments were. Its not like that anymore.

Companies also think if we just put them all together and add in rock stars good code magically happens. Half the time you have to spend a year just to get them to commit on whatever stupid idea they are thinking of. I can not read your mind and come up with 'good things' when you can not even describe what you want. Its little wonder they do not even know what to pay someone. As they are not even sure what the job should be. They think they want to 'improve' things but sometimes adding in a overcomplex bit of software can make things even worse. So they want a bargain on top of it all. I can understand it. Do not like it much but understand it.

Who teaches the teachers?

[sconeu]

Who will teach the librarians to code well enough so that they can pass on that knowledge to the kids?

Vocational training for young kids is a waste.

[hey!]

Who knows what jobs will be available in twenty years, between AI and offshoring? Coding doesn't look like a sure thing at all.

If you are going to focus on a skill, focus on ones that serve in that kind of future environment: being able to pick up on human context and nuance; to decode, no just the literal level of communication, but implicit levels of communication. Because even if AI and foreigners take our coding jobs, somebody is going to have to lay out specifications, and that take imagination and subtlety.

And you know what would be really, really good for developing those kinds of skills? Reading and discussing books.

Because everyone needs to be able to code...

[cshotton]

This is silly. It's like saying the nation's librarians need to teach kids to perform appendectomies, or how to fly a jet airplane, or how to speak Swahili. There's no way that the majority of librarians are qualified to teach programming. If they were, they probably would be doing something related to writing software and not related to library science. And learning to code is no different than learning to engineer a bridge or learning to perform brain surgery. It requires aptitude in the student and competency in the teacher and years of hard work. Trivializing "coding" as if it were something like "typing" or "burger flipping" shows how out of touch the people proposing this actually are. Shame on them for wasting our time and money.