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Apple Trains Chicago Teachers To Put Coding In More Classrooms (engadget.com)
Apple has unveiled a partnership with Northwestern University and public schools to help teachers bring programming and other forms of computer science into Chicago-area classrooms. "The trio will set up a learning hub at Lane Tech College Prep High School that will introduce high school teachers to Apple's Everyone Can Code curriculum," reports Engadget. "They'll also have the option to train in an App Development with Swift course to boost the number of high school-oriented computer science teachers. Teachers will also have options for in-school coaching and mentorship to make sure they're comfortable with the curriculum when they're in front of actual students."
This should be interesting. I didn't know you could train monkeys to program code. We live in fascinating times!
First teach them not to eat detergent pods. Then work your way up to coding from there.
The real title should be "Apple Trains Beauhd To Put Apple Propaganda in More Slashdot Stories"
lucm, indeed.
Which is actually true as long as a good outcome is not required. The results will be about as bad as with the coding though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why not teach them to be lawyers? or medicine? or accounting? Only a small minority of kids will go on to be programmers. The majority won't go anywhere near it.
Call it what it is: Advertising for tech companies to influence young minds. And kool aid for idiot school officials.
If you teach them anything extra how about a little law? Many will be screwed via contract or go into business. Some will be sued or sue. Far more useful than Apple advertisements in the classroom.
Need more GUNS in classrooms! Hurry! Before the next kid with a carbine takes out more KIDS! Do you want more KIDS to DIE? Then MORE GUNS is the only solution. And it's the REPUBLICAN thing to do --- with GOD is on OUR SIDE, we can ONLY WIN!
I went to a sock-hop at Lane Tech and Styx was the band. I didn't go there, but I dated a girl who went to Immaculata and she liked Styx, so she insisted. This is when Styx was still just a local Chicago band. I wouldn't have gone, but she was a freak.
12/10, would endure Lady again.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Brainwashing them young is the only way Swift will survive.
. Teachers will also have options for in-school coaching and mentorship to make sure they're comfortable with the curriculum when they're in front of actual students.
Even if you grant that shoving coding down everyone's throat is a good idea (it's probably not... understanding tech probably is, but coding probably not), you can't just magically make teachers competent coders.
Becoming a good coder - the kind you want to be teaching others - takes many years of real world experience. It takes a good understanding of algorithms, time complexities, and machine architectures. It takes the sweat equity of having made the mistakes, seen why some things are good ideas and others are bad. It takes understanding why elegant designs and good architecture beat spaghetti code patched up to kinda work. It takes an analytical, rigorous mindset.
There are brilliant coders in industry and miserably bad ones who do more damage than good, and the later sometimes has just as much experience as the former, so you can't automatically assume time spent is a good indicator either.
Instead of teaching coding (in this case, code for "vendor mindshare"), let's instead teach people how tech works. Let's teach them where there data is, who controls it, how not to become subservient to "big tech". Let's teach them about online safety. About how to make decisions that vote for socially responsible tech instead of Facebook and other "you are the product" shit. Let's teach them about vendor lock-in, and how to decide if it's a good idea in any given circumstance or not.
There's a lot we could do that'd serve kids better than this. Let's teach them to be well informed citizens of an increasingly digital world, not legions of 3rd-rate coders suffering from Dunning-Kruger because they took a class once.
programmers cheaper. Same with Google and Facebook. Why train workers yourself when you can the public to throw money at it for you?
More teachers don't help with test scores.
More cash did not help bring parts of the USA to some new educational level.
Code and new computer devices don't improve grades every generation.
All this support of computers got attempted over decades. The low test results stay the same.
Teach the in poor areas students math and science. English.
Use tests and exams to sort who should get a full scholarship to one of the very best colleges in the USA.
On merit so only the very best students who can study get a full scholarship.
Arts, biology, medicine, law. Work out what the community wants to see their best students learn.
Computer "work" may not resonate with some communities in the USA with students who want and can learn.
Medicine and law can be seen as the real pathway to a good wage.
To some communities "computer" work is a computer shop selling computers. It has no value in the community as a worthwhile job for the best students.
Stop making all students do something their community sees as a pathway to a below average job.
Stop spending more on "computers" and see if the community wants more support for getting students into law and medicine for their very best students.
For the rest offer support to get into a great number of vocational schools.
Sport, art, music, languages, math, science. Stop expecting "computers" to magically fix every "gap" in education every decade.
The only winners with "computers" is the brand that sells the computer and the sale of support coursework, robot kits.
Try talking with the local community, see what they want for their best students who can learn.
Support the rest of the students with coursework that actually interest them.
Big brand computers for decades did not make poor areas any better educated.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
can fix the hot mess that is apple shitty bug ridden software?
Most of these teachers will do the CPD, learn how to teach a little bit of Apple's coding curriculum, and say they're happy and have learned a lot from it. Only a few will go on to incorporate it into their classes (Apple's curriculum isn't on the Common Core, after all). Those teachers that do dedicate some of their own and their students' time to teaching the curriculum will have to divert their time from elsewhere on the compulsory curriculum. Some core concepts and skills will inevitably bet less attention and, as a result, shallower learning. Whether this shows up in any test scores or not depends on how far the teacher and students went and whether they could compensate for the lost time. There'll probably be no discernible drop in test scores but there won't be any gain either. The reason: Programming/writing code is an entirely non-transferable skill. Again, most teachers, whatever they say in feedback and press releases, will be smart enough to stick to developing their students' literacy, numeracy, and study skills and covering the state mandated curricula to make sure that their students perform well academically.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Indeed.
Hey, don't laugh.
That could be a big sales point in the US education market.
Ios coding is better the no coding, I guess
I thought all the articles making the "tailor Swift" pun mentioned that Apple distributes the reference implementation of Swift under the Apache License 2.0. If a work is distributed as free software under that license, it isn't "proprietary software" by the FSF's definition. What definition of "proprietary" are you using?