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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!
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.
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.