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Code.org Celebrates 5th Anniversary, Success In Changing K-12 Education Policy (slashdot.org)
theodp writes: It's exactly five years since Code.org launched with the video What Most Schools Don't Teach ," noted Code.org in a Monday blog post entitled Dedicating Our 5 year Anniversary to our Partners. "Since then, tens of millions of students have begun learning computer science, hundreds of thousands of schools have begun teaching CS, tens of thousands of teachers have attended workshops to introduce CS in their classrooms, hundreds of school districts have added CS to their curriculum, and forty U.S. states and 25 countries have announced policies and plans to support CS in schools [...] We should start by thanking our amazing donors, particularly Amazon [$10+ million], Facebook [$10+ million], Google [$3+ million], Infosys [$10+ million], and Microsoft [$10+ million]. Whether it's corporate funders, foundations, or individual donors, without your generous funding, we wouldn't exist [...] Changing education policies in forty states wouldn't be possible without the help of Microsoft, College Board, Amazon, and every partner in the Code.org Advocacy Coalition [...] We're particularly fortunate and proud to have had the vocal support of Bill Gates [$4+ million] and Mark Zuckerberg [$1+ million] since day one." Hey, it takes a corporate village to raise a CS-savvy child!
I am the greatest
...Your kids if you truly love and care for & about them.
The US public school system is a failure and a disgrace. They're nothing more than ideological indoctrination centers. They gave up on educating children long ago, as the steady stream of illiterate and incapable-of-basic-math H.S. graduates every year proves beyond a doubt.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
... in oversaturated market - plenty of slaves for stupid capitalist economy
Don't worry, AI will take care of that problem!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
cringe
I've got kids in middle and high school and clearly this comp-sci-in-the-classroom and STEM are really big hot-button topics right now. I see what my kids bring home, and it's not anything great. So some handful of teachers with absolutely zero give-a-shit went to a workshop and hot-glued the proverbial H-bridge Whisker-sensor 'robot' together and put together groups of 3-4 kids for 20 minutes? Or paused the keyboard words-per-minute work in the computer class to let kids navigate to code.org/starwars to fuck around for the last 30 minutes of class dragging visual blocks that write insanely deep if-statements all over the place? Big deal. I never see one kid (including my own) yet come home and say, "Show me more" because it's back to Youtube or Netflix because the value, thinking and logic component was never there. Unfortunately, tear it a part if you want, but that's the day-to-day truth I'm seeing.
Are good are you at doing anything when you, at best, barely-and-occasionally do it? Not good at all and what is being done at that level is not engaging enough to anyone who wants to 'know more'. I've been doing tech, code slinging, SA/DBA/network, and engineering work for 15 years and I still feel like I have a lot to learn every day, and I feel like I can even remotely call myself well-rounded and somewhat polished. And I feel bad for teachers, because a lot of them are doing it solely because it's a requirement and, hey, teachers don't get paid shit for what they put up with, and it impacts their review to get whatever nominal performance or cost-of-living raise on their contract (if any) they were looking for.
Furthermore, ya 'Big Silicon' is donating to it, and millions of dollars is a big deal, but not impacting much. It looks good philanthropically speaking, but it's a way to hide money and be tax except, too, if it's non-profit. What was the biggest donation amount I saw, $10M? Amazon owner net work is almost $1 Trillion. Microsoft? $560 Billion. Facebook? $74 Billion. Google? $500 billion. Their fucking brand is SO BIG, these 'push-CS' movements are not a move to build new crops of 10+ year future talent to keep that sustaining, it just looks good and it's a tax break.
Two points. First, the reason why there is such a big push for this is that tech companies want cheaper labor. No matter how they spin it, the underlying motive is simply money. Second, if computer science becomes mandatory I'd also like to see mechanical engineering become mandatory.
Why do we want primary and secondary pupils to learn how to write software? Software engineers make up just 2.54% of the USA labour force. There's more than double the number of traditional engineers and those are typically higher paid, have better benefits, and enjoy more stable employment, many more in permanent contract positions.
Also, software engineering is highly specialised and narrow and therefore doesn't transfer well, i.e. getting good at coding doesn't make you good at anything else. The principles and practices of traditional engineering are more transferable and therefore more useful to the vast majority of pupils who may study it but never go on to become engineers. Why don't we have an engineering.org campaign, I wonder?
Or to take it further, the single most predictive thing for educational, professional, and social success is literacy. The current average level of literacy for students at university graduation in the USA is B1 (CEFR), which is an intermediate level, far lower than the minimum for overseas students to enter undergraduate studies in the USA. How about a literacy.org campaign?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
I would include basic architecture, medical knowledge, plumbing, and common house whole electrical work.
So, one suitably informed teacher for every 10 schools? Will the other schools still be relying on their PE teachers?
A lot of kids will learn about it on their own, but many won't, so a little bit of high school CS training makes sense, so kids at least understand what an operating system is/does, and the same for databases, compilers, HTTP, etc. Not enough so that they could get a job doing it, but just so they've been exposed to concepts and can talk about it in layman's terms.
They aren't really teaching "CS" in elementary schools. They're treating CS as a job skill and preparing a workforce who can do simple labor. At least they should call all of this "introduction to computer science". It's like doing physics in high school, the most you're doing is replicating experiments and memorizing formulas, you won't be able to graduate from high school and demand a job in physics.
I think a lot of this feeds into parents fears that kids are falling behind. This started in the 80s at least, when computing was suddenly the big thing. CS departments are overcrowded by people with no aptitude or interest in the subject, because their parents insisted this was the right pipeline to get a good paying job. There was the Apple ad showing the student returning home as a failure because he didn't have an Apple computer before college.
But for all these parents who thought computers were mysterious and never figured out how to use a home computer, or even figuring out how to use the computer they had at work, their kids figured them out on their own. If the children can get through high school they'll know how to use the computer, that should no longer be a worry.
So I do think introduction to computing is useful, calling it computer science is stupid. And I do not believe that everyone needs to be a "coder", although knowing the concepts may be useful. But math should take precedence, reading and communication should take precedence, science should take precedence.
But this education is not leading to better workers. It is the most dumbed down of computing, it's training unskilled labor how to use computers. And this is in no way "computer science", it is simple programming. Computer science is large a mixture of applied mathematics, abstract mathematics, numerical analysis, algorithms, electrical engineering, data structures and a mathematical reasoning of them, and much more
Now you don't need all that to become a grunt coder at the modem rung of the job market, but you're not even going to become a decent grunt coder from what you get at coding bootcamps or code.org. The competition out there is fierce and those grunt coder jobs are going to whoever will accept the lowest wage.
Code.org are the disgusting sexists who fined teachers for teaching boys.
Everyone MUST learn how to code is just another one of the intelligentsia's pursuit to a worthless and meaningless end. It is synonymous with the 'everyone needs to learn a foreign language' nonsense. As with all things that are "learned" but never used, when they don't have any reason to use it, they will loose it.