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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.
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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.
That's literally how I got started. At pre-school, age 3, we had a toy tank thing with a keypad on the top. You entered a little program, pressed "go" and off it went.
The understanding that I could program machines lead me to learn BASIC from the manual that came with my first computer. These days I'm an embedded software engineer.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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. School isn't about making experts in the subjects, there's simply no time for that. It's about enough exposure to different subjects so you can (a) find your own thing, and (b) get some idea of the wide and diverse world you'll be living in.
Incidentally, I'm about to teach a small course/workshop in algorithmic art at a local school. I'm not expecting all of them to become algorithmic artists, but I hope they'll learn something about using math and code to express their ideas.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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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.
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?
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"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.
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.
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.
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