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Arizona Bill Would Make Students In Grades 4-12 Participate Once In An Hour of Code (azpbs.org)
theodp writes: Christopher Silavong of Cronkite News reports: "A bill, introduced by [Arizona State] Sen. John Kavanagh [R-Fountain Hills] would mandate that public and charter schools provide one hour of coding instruction once between grades 4 to 12. Kavanagh said it's critical for students to learn the language -- even if it's only one session -- so they can better compete for jobs in today's world. However, some legislators don't believe a state mandate is the right approach. Senate Bill 1136 has passed the Senate, and it's headed to the House of Representatives. Kavanagh said he was skeptical about coding and its role in the future. But he changed his mind after learning that major technology companies were having trouble finding domestic coders and talking with his son, who works at a tech company." According to the Bill, the instruction can "be offered by either a nationally recognized nonprofit organization [an accompanying Fact Sheet mentions tech-backed Code.org] that is devoted to expanding access to computer science or by an entity with expertise in providing instruction to pupils on interactive computer instruction that is aligned to the academic standards."
In the past schools' main purpose was to teach children how to be cheap industry workers. This feels like the past may be coming back.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
This is clever, but I don't think it's as clever as they think it is. And I don't think they intended it to be clever.
If there's an hour of coding class in school at some point, that means that would-be nerds will be introduced to it, and if they like it then they can look into it themselves. Non would-be nerds would have an hour of weird confusing shit and then never have to worry about it again. That's the clever bit, it's cheap and it doesn't force kids to do stuff.
BUT. If the one hour is shit then it'll turn kids off programming (not entirely a bad thing, yeah...) and kids who would've found out about it in their own time might not do it at all.
One hour of code between grades 4-12.
So, a fourth grader can learn to move the turtle to make a shape.
Or, a twelfth grader can learn how to make html, head, body, and a few divs.
Surely, this will save us from our dire STEM shortage.
"it's critical for students to learn the language" The actual article mentions JavaScript. Is this "the language" students must learn?
In most colleges computer science classes. The first hour you can normally get a print out of text. An input that save the variable. Then prints the variable. Most of the class is just figuring out the ide, or getting the syntax right.
You won't get into if conditional and loops and mathematical processing until hour 3 or so.
Then you get into nesting. That is where students who didn't have any coding experience struggle for the first time.
1 hour is a joke. Back in my days where schools had 8 bit computers we were taught how to code in elementary. As coding was an important aspect in computer literacy. Then when Windows 95 came out the computer training got really stupid and just showed how to use Office.
I know the government wants to make coding the next blue collar job but it takes a lot of knowledge and practice to perfect the craft.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
all they have to do now is give them a linux box so they can build a windows kvm and go with the flow of the corporate world.
It might add some small amount of coders to the workforce who would otherwise have never tried it out. But, that is probably insignificant. What I'm more interested in is priming people to "get" tech.
Working at small non-tech companies for the past ~5 years really opened my eyes to how completely unready for tech most people are. Old, young, it doesn't matter -- so many people have no comprehension of what developers do beyond maybe "magic", and practically shut down when asked to participate.
We don't need America to have more developers, but we do need America to get ready for a world where every company is a tech company.
Arizona Bill...
That sounds like the name of a gunslinger that just blew into town. Not only can he handle his six shooters, he's also the fastest guy on a Dvorak keyboard in six states and he writes C code faster than a pony express rider with a Comanche war party on his heels ... nah, that doesn't sound quite right but still cooler than a dull old state senate bill.
You won't get into if conditional and loops and mathematical processing until hour 3 or so.
That's fine for college, but if they only have 1 hour, they should go Directly to Loops in Hour 1.
I would suggest they use a Toy language with a program counter and assembly primitives.
By sticking with Assembly as the language to introduce with, It will be much simpler, since there are fewer concepts, no sophisticated mathematical structures such as nesting or advanced syntax to teach directly --- just a vocabulary of instructions, And there is Very little/No syntax to learn,
even though it would be more work to write practical programs. That way students can be tought Loops and IF statements as the same subject, Since, really, they Are the same thing.... Just conditional branches; The only thing special about a loop is the Destination PC address includes code already run.
Also, no need to teach Higher-level abstractions such as Variables at an introductory level...... Registers are plenty sufficient.
All this is going to do is take the students and shove their faces into a subject that many would hate, and others would like if they weren't forced but will hate because they WERE forced.
Simple fact of the matter is that, despite the complete and utter denial people seem to be in, writing programs takes a certain mindset, a ton of practice, and even more specialized knowledge... and that's if you want to write bad code.
If you want to write good code, it's much worse.
I think it should be mandatory that all college freshman students participate in one hour of basketball dunking per day.
Oh, you mean not every 18-year old is over 6 feet tall, and possesses the athletic ability to dunk a basketball?
Gosh, that must mean that not everyone is cut out for it. You know, kind of like coding, so how about we stop with this pointless "mandatory" bullshit already.
Looking for a skill that would truly benefit future generations? Perhaps we should mandate an hour of studying the Constitution every day, for an enslaved society is still enslaved, no matter how skilled they are.
This is against my deeply held religious beliefs. They want to teach young impressionable children how to feed the Beast! /s
Just say no
Same here. I now have been coding for 30 years and I am still learning stuff. (Of course, I know a bit more than one language in one coding paradigm ...)
This "teach everybody to code" is really unmitigated nonsense. As any skill, coding takes a few years to get any good at it and it requires specific talents even for that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I know the government wants to make coding the next blue collar job but it takes a lot of knowledge and practice to perfect the craft.
Only problem with that is that it will never happen. Really simple things like building a web-page do not require any coding anymore. But as soon as you get into things that does, you need far more than that and "advanced white-collar" is more were you will find it once this settles. Sure, at the moment there are a lot cheap and really bad coders around, but they destroy value, i.e. their work has negative productivity. The business world is slow to figure this out, but that cannot last. And when it is finally something generally known, many current coders will lose their jobs. The last thing we need is a whole additional bunch of bad coders.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You may not believe it, but back in the pre-1970s, every student taking science courses was expected to learn how to use a slide rule. Sometimes it was a similar one-hour intro, sometimes it came with the curriculum.
Programming high-level languages is the slide rule of the current era. Despite what many people think(cough cough Excel cough), you simply cannot be a scientist or engineer if you can't write decent code in, say R or python or Matlab.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
This is just compete bullshit. There is no way to do anything in 1 hour besides wasting everybodies time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I completely agree. Coding is hard, even when done badly.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You're going to find people this way. There's always one or two kids that haven't seen it, didn't try it, and they never knew they had a knack for it. Without exposure you'll never know what works (just like all coding).
In one hour if 90% of the class says "meh" then you've still got 4-5 young kids going home and asking Dad for a PC. Two of those might even read a book or two. This is equally true for all career paths but computer science has to be started young because there's an enormous and ever expanding body of knowledge underneath it. It might take a lifetime to even read The Art Of Programming.
ah, that doesn't sound quite right but still cooler than a dull old state senate bill.
Let's put him in a room with Florida Man and see who makes it out alive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
English lessons force everyone to do some writing too, yet how many students actually become authors. And of these, how many become authors BECAUSE of the grammar and language lessons they received?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When I was in 6th grade, we had a semester of shop class and a semester of home economics.
(In previous generations, the boys had a year of shop and the girls had a year of home ec.)
It all seemed kind of hokey: it was clearly a vestige of an earlier time, but, whatever.
Anyway, if you want to expose everyone to computers, that's the place to slot it in:
a semester or a year of computer class in 6th grade.
"An hour of Math is definitely going to be effective in teaching math. Why in the world have I spent my entire life perfecting my PhD level math?"
"An hour of English is definitely going to be effective in teaching how to write a novel. Why in the world have I spent my entire life perfecting my art"?
"An hour of Shop class is definitely going to be effective in teaching how to build a house. Why in the world have I spent my entire life perfecting house building"?
The point is to expose you to what is out there. Most slashdotters seem to have been lucky enough to have been exposed through other means. I learned to code because I just happened to find HyperCard and a HyperCard book at the library then learned to code TI-BASIC because I was bored in Math class and read my TI-89 manual. It was constant exposure that started
Without those two bits of happenstance I wouldn't make my living writing code as a Mechanical Engineer. The point of adding this is to expose kids to it so that if it piques their interest they can take a second hour. Or a 3rd hour. Or make a career out of it.
Why not just use this hour to train them to be plumbers or electricians? They are far more likely to be able to solder two copper pipes together or wire a light switch in an hour than produce anything tangible with a computer program.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The sole purpose of this is so that some politician can claim "I proposed legislation to ensure that all grade-school children in this state are taught programming" next time they're up for re-election. It doesn't matter if the bill passes or fails, it doesn't matter if what the kids are to be taught amounts to one hour over eight years of schooling or a full hour a week for the full eight years of grades 4-12, since all this is really about is to get a line on a politician's resume that shows how *deeply* they care about STEM education. That said, one hour over eight years is a nice safe way of ensuring that the person behind it can't be accused of "wasting taxpayer dollars" should it actually pass.
One, this is oddly progressive for the predominantly republican state of Arizona.
Two, I don't think it's a good idea. Not everyone has the special talent for programming. Others (myself included) are marginally decent at it, but still have no desire to actually do it. Those who have the interest and drive to learn how to do it usually end up doing it on their own. It's not like you need to access to a school's computer lab these days, you can write code on a smartphone. Granted, that's far from optimal, but so are most school computer labs.
Is there really some huge demographic of people who are both talented and want to program, but somehow don't figure that out on their own by age 15? Seems unlikely to me. Kids with interest in this sort of stuff are already working on it themselves. The last thing they want is to sit in a classroom typing Hello World programs over and over again until everyone catches up. All that's going to to do is bore them. The same types of people who excel at programming, also get bored easily working in a classroom setting. So why taint their favorite activity?
One hour of instruction is definitely going to be effective in teaching a programming language. Why in the world have I spent my entire life perfecting my art.
You're totally missing the point of this I program. One hour of code tells students how a computer does what it does, and meanwhile will tell the lucky few whether they would have any interest in going in for a lifetime of code.
That's how BASIC programs started out. You'd get a magazine in the mail and copy word for word what they printed and tada, you had a "program". It was nothing more than straight copy and paste. Then you went and changed all the print statements to PENIS. Or changed the color of the output. Eventually parts of the copy paste started to click and people went on to writing their own code.
Most of the class is just figuring out the ide, or getting the syntax right.
DOS EDIT was a bitch back in the day.
[,,,] make coding the next blue collar job but it takes a lot of knowledge and practice to perfect the craft.
So does carpentry, electrical, plumbing or any other skilled trade that face a shortage of workers as the native-born workforce is aging out and foreign workers are going home.
I hear all this talk about learning "The Language". And I am reminded of the Edsger Dijkstra / folklore quote "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." IMHO, kids need to learn some basics of the machine and what it does, before going into learning a language to do those things. (And yes, I am aware of the Bill Gates quote that seems to say the opposite (if taken without context). But I'm not a big MS fan, so maybe I'm biased against Gates in any case.)
On the other hand, Finland seems to introduce their school kids to the principles and concepts of e.g. looping, conditionals and variables without computers and in conjunction with other (real-life) activities. But hey, who has time for Linus' home country and their crazy ideas?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I would suggest they use a Toy language with a program counter and assembly primitives.
LOGO was quite popular on the Apple ][ for elementary schools in the 1980's. It taught students how to count steps, drop or pick up cursor, turn left or right at angles (i.e., 45-, 90-, 180- and 360-degrees), and make complex geometric shapes.
Also, no need to teach Higher-level abstractions such as Variables at an introductory level...... Registers are plenty sufficient.
Programming never made sense to me until after I got into college algebra to learn the order of operations and spent three years working years working as a video game tester. When I went back to community college to learn programming, everything fell into place and I graduated with a 4.0 GPA.
I don't understand why coding is treated like a simple skill, similar to, say, typing, that anyone can learn. I'm not saying you need a talent, but definitely not everybody can code, and even fewer can produce quality code. And there is nothing worse than poorly written code created by someone who learned to code to get a high-paying job, but who doesn't really get coding. You know, unnecessarily complex and convoluted, full of bugs, impossible to debug or rewrite part of it. When it's easier and faster to start from scratch than to fix the mess they created. I'm not saying we shouldn't promote learning how to code, but forcing everyone to learn it is like forcing everyone to learn how to write poetry.
All of this is bullshit.
I taught myself how to code because, goddamit, I was interested in it, and I had a natural aptitude.
And, you're right ...
Once I went that direction, I lived and breathed it and paid my dues in mental frustration that comes with learning anything well enough to be a fucking top dog.
Meanwhile, one of my (6) brothers learned to play the guitar, write music, sing like Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce and Jimmy Buffet, etc. and is a semi-pro.
He can't navigate Microsoft Word and I can't carry a tune in a paper bag.
This coding shit is the "you gotta be an engineer" equivalent of the mid 60s.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I think it should be mandatory that all college freshman students participate in one hour of basketball dunking per day.
PE is required in most schools as far as I know.
Even in college I had mandatory physical education classes I had to take. I could chose the subject but I had to take something.
I actually don't think it's bad to expose all students to coding, even those who might be bad at it - because you also never know who might be good at it or enjoy it. If it were a whole class I would say it's probably too much, but at least an hour seems fine to just expose kids to some possibilities...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's nothing wrong with that. Parents or children don't usually know what's worth learning (unless they've had a successful career). So keeping an eye on the job market is a good start. But it mustn't stop there. Firstly because the job market will highlight required skills for being a good little employee, which is not necessarily your best career path. And secondly because the job market can not even tell you about useful skills for tomorrow's employees, just for today's employees.
Necessary life skills vary (nowadays the ability to spot fake news and to do a little bit of research online are useful) , but necessary job skills mostly include an ability to interface with others and specific skills that are valuable in themselves (processing or specialist effect skills).
Interfacing skills involve the ability to communicate (command of language), cultural understanding (in Western society you need to be able to read a clock, keep appointments, stick to deadlines) some understanding of social dynamics, ability to adopt a role, ability to commit to fulfilling that role (be it a leading or a following role, or one with aspects of both). Unless you're aiming for a job that requires only elementary school skills, you'll need to receive further education. Study skills are essential there. Everyone should learn as much about interface and study skills as they can absorb.
Much of those interfacing and study skills will be taught to you by your parents. That's a natural and intense process that goes on all the time during childhood and it's quite efficient. Which is why children from middle or upper class parents have a head start when it comes to preparing for middle class or upper class type jobs.
Some of the harder skills to learn (reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, mathematics, structured thinking) are taught by professionals (teachers).
Coding is an aspect of a specific personal skill (and a shallow one at that) that goes into the skill set of a software engineer. Becoming a good software engineer takes talent, time, and effort. A tiny little course in school might serve as an "awareness raiser", but nothing else. Competence (obtained through talent and training) at coding alone qualifies you for one function only: code monkey.
A basic understanding of contemporary machinery (such as gained through learning how to program) is a valuable interface skill in that it allows you to understand a lot more about how our society works.
The question is: what is our objective here?
If our goal is to try and supply slightly more and slightly better code monkeys, start teaching Java or C and integrate that into the curriculum as a full-blown subject.
If our goal is to give children a taste of what machinery is like, and how to work with it, then a short (20 hour) course in Basic or Python plus building a simple web page and (perhaps an elementary app for their smartphone to whet their interest) will do fine.
It shouldn't surprise anybody that after an era where "self expression" and "personal development" were in vogue we're seeing a reappraisal of job-related skills. We shouldn't go overboard with that but continue to teach time-tested (and difficult to learn) interfacing skills. In addition to which there may well be a place for more emphasis on job-related skills.
They teach coding in Lebret?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Teaching shell scripting and Powershell would be cool.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is just compete bullshit. There is no way to do anything in 1 hour besides wasting everybodies time.
1 Hour a week for a semester would do plenty.....
There's too many coders as it is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Accessing FTP sites with Java and/or Python. It will be great training. See article above this.
I know the government wants to make coding the next blue collar job but it takes a lot of knowledge and practice to perfect the craft.
In the decades I've worked as a software developer, I've almost never had a boss who cared at all for "perfect". OTOH, I can think of many times when I was explicitly ordered to not implement something correctly. Normally, their only concern is getting deliveries to customers, which involves satisfying sales people and customer people who usually have no clue at all about software quality, and are primarily concerned with money issues.
Granted, I have had a few cases where, years after my job was terminated, I received some nice messages saying that nobody had ever found a bug in any of the sofware that I wrote. But this is after the fact; while working they were never particularly interested in high-quality code. And they had no way of judging it except by waiting for years and counting the reported bugs.
So I'd predict that most educators and employers will be pleased by the "hour of code" concept, and will push for its adoption. Then they'll work out the bugs in the approach in the future, as the bugs make themselves known.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Assuming the teacher knows what they are doing, that scratch is up and running on machines before the class starts, that there is enough equipment for 1 PC/ipad per student, that there are a few adult volunteers to help kickstart the kids. Then they can learn something worthwhile in that hour.
They will learn if they like doing this kind of thing and they will learn that it is easy and they will learn that they can download scratch to their PC at home or their school ipad and play around with it on their own.
I know it works because I have led a one-off class like that at an elementary school (after hours) and a few of the kids came up to me weeks later and said that they had got into programming scratch because of it and they entered scratch projects at the science fair
Nullius in verba
For "coding"? Not a chance in hell.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Probably.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.