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How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms
theodp writes: Noting that Apple CEO Tim Cook's advice for President Trump at last week's White House gathering of the Tech Titans was that "coding should be a requirement in every public school," the New York Times examines How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms (Warning: source may be paywalled). "The Apple chief's education mandate was just the latest tech company push for coding courses in schools," writes Natasha Singer. "But even without Mr. Trump's support, Silicon Valley is already advancing that agenda -- thanks largely to the marketing prowess of Code.org, an industry-backed nonprofit group." Singer continues: "In a few short years, Code.org has raised more than $60 million from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Salesforce, along with individual tech executives and foundations. It has helped to persuade two dozen states to change their education policies and laws, Mr. Hadi Partovi, co-founder of Code.org, said, while creating free introductory coding lessons, called Hour of Code, which more than 100 million students worldwide have tried. Along the way, Code.org has emerged as a new prototype for Silicon Valley education reform: a social-media-savvy entity that pushes for education policy changes, develops curriculums, offers online coding lessons and trains teachers -- touching nearly every facet of the education supply chain. The rise of Code.org coincides with a larger tech-industry push to remake American primary and secondary schools with computers and learning apps, a market estimated to reach $21 billion by 2020." Singer also mentions Apple's work to spread computer science in schools. The company launched a free app last year called Swift Playgrounds to teach basic coding in Swift, as well as a yearlong curriculum for high schools and community colleges to teach app design in Swift.
Anyone coasting on a mid-level job is going to lose it to all these cheap workers coming down the pipe. If you don't specialize, you're finished.
Now, if only we can achieve gender and race equality in software development jobs. Right now, it's abysmal, and far too many workers in the field refuse to acknowledge the problem. Sure, it provides job security for mediocre programmers, but that's not really desirable. Bringing women and racial minorities into the field would increase the talent pool and translate into overall better software development in the industry. However, it comes at the expense of displacing many mediocre programmers who fight against it and sent there's a problem rather than improve their skills. Hopefully teaching coding to both genders and all races increases the talent pool for coders and results in better equality in the field. If it means that some mediocre programmers lose their jobs, that's a win for software quality.
Want coding taught in schools. How about a common coding language based soundly upon English grammar and maths formulas. The tech titan morons can not even decide whether the alphabet should be A B C or Q W E, why should we take advice from those morons, when their core interest is only teaching the coding language that favours their bottom line and fuck the rest. Hell, they want to ban OSs, ban competing languages, lock up data, force purchase of software by students and make them learn their QWEs, from the earliest age so they can start selling new era copyrighted and patented dictionaries, where you pay to use words based around Q W E R T Y U I O P A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M as the new alphabet. Patents on new language, like those idiot patents from everything transferred from common use to internet use.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
They don't give a crap about anything except an influx of rock-bottom-priced workers.
I teach IT/Computing to 4-11-year-olds and code.org is a fantastic, free and invaluable resource. The activities I use (Course 1-3) build up familiarity with block-based coding, which can lead into Scratch for the old children and into secondary/high school. The kids really enjoy the activities and the activities have a nice steady learning curve so 90% of the time they can get on without me having to stop the whole class to explain something. So everyone learns at their own pace and the brighter ones can get further in and really be challenged without having to be held up to wait for others to catch up. Since it is so visual, it even caters to the poor readers and poor English language skills and gives them a rare lesson where they're on a par with the others.
Everything I've used so far has been free which is also a boon when my IT budget is basically zero thanks to cuts in school budget. Any time you see 'education' attached to software you usually have to pay through the nose for something that is buggy, teaching outdated skills or technology, and that invariably runs only on XP and has a critical install disc that someone has lost.
For the age range I'm looking at, it's teaching the right kind of problem solving skills that can be picked up when they move onto Python or whatever textual language their secondary school decides to use.
So despite whatever misgivings you have about the motives of Silicon Valley in providing this resource, it's hard to argue that as an educational resource it is anything less than excellent.
There doesn't need to be a huge amount of time spent on this. not everyone needs to become a programmer.
But there needs to be enough exposure to demystify the field. Students should come out of school with a basic understanding of the different fields available.
at this point the number of people who are never going to do any trivial programming (spreadsheet formulas and setting things to happen in sequence count) is getting smaller and smaller, so expose everyone to the ideas early. Then let them figure what they want to do from there. Don't force them to keep studying it once they have the basic idea of what can be done and that computers are not magic.
David Lang
Wondering if the site was built by people learning in the project classes. It ask me my language every new page load, the previously chosen language is not selected, and sometimes, after select the language, it redirects to a 404 page.
I remember in middle school Spanish was a requirement to graduate and go to high school. Yet most people that took that class left without knowing anything they didn't already know. And also most of the Latin American kids failed the class. Even when they could have full conversations in Spanish or a dialect of. But us fair skinned people could barely say "hi my name is Apple"
Cobal was written to use english grammer and math forumlas, it's horrible to program in
I live in sicilicone valley consoling computers and fixing broken users I make 55K including my side line busenesses
My school district is a joke. They give students decent industry strength laptops with SSD's. But there is no decent curriculum to teach coding. There is no such goal in my district. The sole purpose of the laptops is to make the students do their homework online in other subjects. So the only skills they learn are typing and using a mousepad. They don't even learn to make spread sheets or draw graphs. They don't use arrays or formulas. They don't do sophisticated word processing. They don't teach data structures or algorithms. They don't teach about loops, scoping, or code blocks.
The UK and Finland have a purpose in their CS instruction: to create a grass roots software industry.
I had programming in high school. Made no difference in my life. The hard sciences, math, writing and music classes did more for me.
This pushing coding into schools is yet another way corporate America is getting subsidized by the US taxpayer. If the billionaire class wants more code monkeys, they can pay for it.
There's much more to life than the job - like music and art. It's like they want to turn this society into a one dimensional boring society of just tech worker bees.
nice ad hominem attack
you actually have no idea how many different languages I program in or how long I've been doing it.
Ask anyone who's used cobol, they will agree that it's a bad idea.
Points in the finishing year courses in our secondary schools (Victoria, Australia) could be gained by working at MacDonalds. This is not new. When you have a mine, you want the taxpayers to train the miners.
Seriously, as someone who's been doing the IT thing for 20 years and actually likes teaching new people the ins and outs of the job -- where else are you going to get your newbies from? I've seen so many people say teaching development and IT is a waste of time because all the work is going offshore, and it crowds out existing workers, and the kids won't learn anything anyway. I remember and use a tiny fraction of what I was taught in school; not everything has to have an immediate ROI and it helps to have at least a small amount of knowledge about a broad range of topics. If nothing else, you're not helpless when it comes to what's actually going on inside the magic box. There's so much abstraction already, both in software and IT -- it's hard to differentiate "coding" from snapping pre-built libraries and frameworks together. Why not spend a little time in the classroom, show simple examples that illustrate how to make a computer do what you want, and maybe a few students will be interested in it?
Saying we shouldn't teach coding in school is like saying we shouldn't teach at least a basic course of biology or chemistry because no one who isn't a biologist or chemist will ever use it. I already have enough problems with software developers and "architects" who have absolutely no idea how their software runs, or can't get their head around capacity issues that would be easily understood if they just understood first principles.
If Tim cook knows about the supply and demand principal in economics with computer science labor being the product here? Who am I kidding? Of course he knows, he is a CEO. If you have children ask yourself: do you want their skill to be in something there is a large supply of? Or do you want your children to go a different way than the masses and have a skill that is in high demand and low supply.
Push all the coding you want. Won't magically make more American students capable of becoming good coders. I am a coder. I work with many imported Indians. They are generally good coders. This will be a failed liberal effort. How is it that I am a coder yet personal computers did not even exist when I went to grade school and high school? How is it that some of the best coders I know didn't go to college? Can't teach smart.
Teaching code to kids makes as much sense as teaching them law. Good coding requires a comprehension of several fundamentals. You can't jump over these basics. What you first need to develop in kids is critical thinking and problem solving skills. Marry that with an understanding of logic and basic concepts like variables, arrays and loops, and maybe by the time kids get to high school they have the fundamentals to write functional software. Sure, if a kid wants to jump in on this earlier, super, but thinking coding is an elementary (not an advanced) skill is the mistake here.
By having so many more people knowing how to develop software, that will drive salaries down.
Silicon Valley is insular and out of touch, don't think they're doing this because it is a great idea. They're doing it because they believe nobody deserves a raise. Yes, they are that out of touch.
Teaching kids to program sounds good in theory - think of all the skills children have to acquire in order to do it well. But what education is really about is transferable skills that pupils can use outside of the classrooms in which the taught. So far, the hard evidence shows that no skills learned from programming in classrooms transfer. If kids learn to program, all they get good at is programming. In education, we call that a waste of time.
there are other ways to teach logical thinking (Math anyone? Or just a good 'ole logic course).
But this was never about learning to think. It's always been about dropping wages. Me? I don't let my kid anywhere near code. She's in medicine and doesn't need or want it. Why medicine? It's the only middle class career path left. My bro's in a dead end job working shit hours. He's got a guy in his 20s with a CS degree there because he can't find a job. You want my kid to write code? Bring back the jobs and stop giving them to H1-Bs. Bring the Jobs and us parents will bring the kids. Until then shove off. We ain't buying any.
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How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms
Brilliant title. Silicon Valley which is located in the state of California in the United States of America manages to get coding into American Classrooms. Mind blown.
We'll make great pets
I've been saying this for years: make Computer Science (theoretical math, logic, basic linguistics) a mandatory subject in K12 education alongside (applied) math, science, etc. Also, yank pre-calculus and calculus (save it for physics majors in college, offer it as a math elective in high school) and offer statistics for students advanced enough to get that far. Statistical illiteracy is one of the main drivers behind our fake news problem.
Brian Krebs agrees with me, citing this as Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia:
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
"How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms"
Does it have anything to do with the 'news stories' they paid the editors to run in publications like this?
Back in the 1980s and 1990s it was more or less normal to have programming lesions in school. It was only in the 1990s when companies shipped computers without BASIC Interpreters, and marketing claimed that you could productively use computers without being able to program. Learning how to use Office 95 was enough.
Now they complain about the lost generation of people having been trained only to be dumb consumers.
The best programmers have a basic skillset that is not present in the vast majority of elementary school children. It is learned through other coursework that sets a solid foundation. What they will create through these programs is a vast army of people with a knowledge of being able to program, that can't program to the level needed for quality robust applications.
Far better would be to teach the basics needed to become a good programmer. Logic, breaking large problems into smaller tractable problems, taking generic problem statements and being able to execute them as specific to an environment. The ability to take a set of steps to accomplish a task that doesn't work and identify the problem. All of these can be taught in a more appropriate way based on the frame of reference that young children have. They can be complex later, but start smaller, like given a step stool, a ladder, a dad and a ball that is on top of a roof, tell dad exactly how to retrieve the ball. Then ask what assumptions they made while creating their instructions. It's an identifiable problem and has a realizable solution. Also, teach them the skills of recognizing incomplete or contradictory instructions and to ask questions to resolve absent information or resolve contradictory information. And teach an alternate human language (like Spanish, German, Russian,French, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) to get that embedded ability to think with a different vocabulary.
After they have the base skills then introduce some formal logic (these objects bounce, a ball is one of these objects, do all balls bounce?), and then introduce them to programming. You can't force people to become good programmers, and I still say anyone can program, do you want millions of bad programmers? It is contrary to the goal of having good programs. And I haven't even touched on the marginal quality code is often riddled with security issues. In this day and age you need to teach good versus bad programming techniques early in any curriculum. Teach logic and problem solving, and problem specifying, teach how to recognize defective requirements, teach a second or third human language, then think about teaching programming. Programmers versus coders.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I'm a software engineer with a MS in CompSci. I don't think programming should be required in K12 programs. I'd be happy with schools having survey of computation type class which imparts a high level understanding of how networking, computers, handheld devices, gaming systems, web technology, etc work. Include a small unit with basic programming in it, sure. One should not be clueless about how technology works in our world, but most people don't and won't ever write code. Of course, programming should be around as an elective for anyone so inclined.
IMO, the push behind this effort by the big tech companies is because of the difficulty hiring good programmers/software engineers and because they can't hire enough women or minorities because few women and minorities enter this field. The thought behind this first is that not enough people go into computer science programs in college (or STEM more broadly) because they weren't exposed enough to it. "If we could only get more kids to think programming is fun, then more of them would pursue it as a career and we'd have a bigger/better talent pool to recruit from" is the corporate thought. Same thing with diversity: "If only more girls or more people of minority group X studied CS/STEM, we'd be able to have our company's diversity match the diversity of the general population." This though then leads to "lets make kids take programming classes in school so they will be exposed to programming.
I'm all for giving people opportunity and there is much room for improvement in that area. But I think we do a disservice to individual people when we push someone to do or not do something because a group is over or under represented somewhere (saying to a girl, go into field X because the population is 51% women therefore the population of graduates in field X should be 51% women). Give people opportunity and then let them make their own choices.
All of the hundreds and thousands of studies which demonstrate that replacing virtually ANY other subject with programming will lead to a 20 point increase in IQ and at least 20% in additional income and a better sex life. Here let me link to the review. ... It should be obvious that doing machine language throughout grade school, assembly language in middle school and COBOL in high school will have virtually unlimited upside consequences, since fortunately those languages, just like all of the others, never become obsolete. Cook is certainly entitled to express his opinion, never mind that it is blatantly self-serving. And never mind that there's little evidence that shows programming educational programs scale well and will actually do more good than harm.
I think it is an excuse to fool politicians that there are not enough programmers in the USA, so they can hire more h-1bs. The USA makes enough programmers, and would make more, if there was more money in jobs for it.