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!

Comments

Why software engineering?

[VeryFluffyBunny]

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?