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.

Comments

Re:Get to senior level as soon as you can

[Geoffrey.landis]

Think back to your school days. There certainly were some subjects you had exactly zero interest in. Well? What did forcing you to learn that shit accomplish?

In fact, there are many many things in school that kids don't want to learn but are nevertheless valuable for them to have learned.

Do you remember anything, and if, enough to actually go into a profession that requires you to know anything about it?

That's your flaw right there. Coding is a knowledge set that has some value to know even if you don't go into a profession that requires coding. It teaches a way of logically understanding how a problem is broken down into a process, and how processes run. (And it also gives students some familiarity with what's inside the stuff that they will interact with every day of their lives, so that they understand it's code, it's not some sort of magic.)

Education is not simply job training.