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With Few US Students Taking CS Classes, Code.org 'Scales Back' Funding For CS Education (acm.org)
"In 2012, most CS teacher professional development was paid for by the National Science Foundation or Google." And in the years that followed, 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers received opportunities to learn how to teach computer science without paying any fees -- thanks to tech-bankrolled Code.org.
But is anyone taking the classes? Slashdot reader theodp quotes a Communications of the ACM post by University of Michigan professor Mark Guzdial: In 2013, Code.org began, and they changed the face of CS education in the United States . It started out as just a video (linked here, seen over 14 million times), and grew into an organization that created and provided curriculum, offered teacher professional development, and worked with states and districts around public policy initiatives. A recent report from Code.org showed that 44 states have enacted public policies to promote computing education in the five years from 2013 to 2018, and much of that happened through Code.org's influence....
Now, Code.org has announced that they are starting to scale back their funding, which begins a multi-year transition to shift the burden of paying for teacher professional development to the local regions.... The only question is whether it's too soon. Will local regions step up and demonstrate that they value computer science by paying for it...? I'd guess that many states have between 40% and 70% of their high schools now offering computer science. However, even though many schools offer computer science, there are still few students taking computer science.
Indiana reported that only 0.4% of Indiana high school students had enrolled in their most popular course. Meanwhile in one region in Texas, 54 of 159 high schools offer computer science, yet only 2.3% of their students have ever taken a computer science class. But of course, there's another issue.
"If Code.org (or NSF or Google) are paying for all the development of CS teachers, then the districts don't get to say, 'In our community we care about this and we care less about that.' The U.S. education system is organized around the local regions calling the shots, setting the priorities, and deciding what they want teachers to teach."
But is anyone taking the classes? Slashdot reader theodp quotes a Communications of the ACM post by University of Michigan professor Mark Guzdial: In 2013, Code.org began, and they changed the face of CS education in the United States . It started out as just a video (linked here, seen over 14 million times), and grew into an organization that created and provided curriculum, offered teacher professional development, and worked with states and districts around public policy initiatives. A recent report from Code.org showed that 44 states have enacted public policies to promote computing education in the five years from 2013 to 2018, and much of that happened through Code.org's influence....
Now, Code.org has announced that they are starting to scale back their funding, which begins a multi-year transition to shift the burden of paying for teacher professional development to the local regions.... The only question is whether it's too soon. Will local regions step up and demonstrate that they value computer science by paying for it...? I'd guess that many states have between 40% and 70% of their high schools now offering computer science. However, even though many schools offer computer science, there are still few students taking computer science.
Indiana reported that only 0.4% of Indiana high school students had enrolled in their most popular course. Meanwhile in one region in Texas, 54 of 159 high schools offer computer science, yet only 2.3% of their students have ever taken a computer science class. But of course, there's another issue.
"If Code.org (or NSF or Google) are paying for all the development of CS teachers, then the districts don't get to say, 'In our community we care about this and we care less about that.' The U.S. education system is organized around the local regions calling the shots, setting the priorities, and deciding what they want teachers to teach."
in America? Every job site I've seen is at best 80/20 H1-Bs, sometimes 90/10. You can't even get a project management job anymore. Companies did away with all the entry level positions so they could claim there was a shortage of "senior programmers" so there's no career track.
Momma's don't let your babies grow up to be CS Majors, let'em be Doctor's and such.
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By the time they are teens kids should be able to learn CS without a meat puppet hovering over them in a class, one somewhere far away behind a computer to help them occasionally should be enough together with good parents to keep them motivated.
Sure it's a noble goal to try to rescue kids from bad parents, but it's an uphill battle ... attack the problem at it's source first and foremost, parenting classes in high school rather than CS.
Very plausible, but still off-topic.
Kids don't need CS training to use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, etc.
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
Why take computer science courses? When the get out of college all the development work is done either outsourced to india or via "highskilled" h1b visa.
Better to take business courses so you to be the people who direct the h1b's what to do.
Coding is a lost cause with no career paths anymore.
Anybody in their right mind would do it. It's an awesome career offering opportunity anywhere on the planet, and the pay is higher than most fields out there, and the amount of formal education required is still close to nil. It's an awesome career.
I don't respond to AC's.
The big question is, how many of those kids should be learning programming.
When I started out in the late 70s, you were busy coding solutions to problems, and writing real code. Later it became more about memorizing big function/class libraries, which got old pretty fast.
I asked a younger guy who is in the business about it recently, and he said nowadays what you learn are 'frameworks', whatever that is.
Even back in the 70s, when I was taking classes, the beginning classes were big for Comp Sci majors, but as I progressed, they got smaller and smaller as more and more people realized it wasn't for them.
And I wonder how good all those 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers actually are at teaching programming.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Just like climate change...all of our leaders pay it lipservice but very few, including consumers, are speaking with thier wallet. The head of GM just asked for bold legislation that would allow them to pursue electric vehical without them having to deal with spooking investors. In short, nearly everyone is afraid to lead. I'm not of the opinion that electric vehical would do anything to help the environment but they would sure love that government boost to remove the risk in introducing average priced EVs so they can get a leg up and push out Tesla. I have been thinking about this a lot. Electric motors would actually help trucks be more efficient but there is no way automakers are going to cut into thier $10k profit per truck just to introduce a better product to consumers for the same price. Same with big rigs. Those desperately could use the assistance of a high torque electric motor. Consumers, and investors in turn, are not willing to put up the extra cash to prop up the current profit levels. A lot of people go along with the hype but deep down they know the environment is not in danger of eradicating us because of fossil fuels and hence will not do anything to enact some of knee jerk proposed solutions. Same thing will play out in the STEM push. There isn't a problem and wallets speak the truth.
If kids are interested in programming, just point them at https://codecombat.com/
Kids that will be natural programmers won't even need a teacher to play
If SJWs want more girls in programming, they should fork https://github.com/codecombat/... and make a version that is more appealing to young girls.
Promoting of CS as a career choice will lead to both resentment by those already established*, as well as too many pursuing too few, lowering wages, and standards. Formal education leads to a well rounded student, and employee.
*Look at the humor surrounding certification.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
That's what I was going to say... just not so politely.
Maybe. It is interesting how programming games are a popular genre on Steam. No classes required there, and it gives one an idea in a fun way.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
as changing the car's wipers is to rocket science.
i.e. completely unrelated. C'mon /. we know better than this.
And I wonder how good all those 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers actually are at teaching programming.
They're as good at teaching programming as they are at programming.
"I asked a younger guy who is in the business about it recently, and he said nowadays what you learn are 'frameworks', whatever that is."
*raised eyebrow* Frameworks are an old idea. "Whatever that is" shouldn't be a question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
If the only needed thing was a warm body then yes. However in telecommuting one's doing more than that. They're bringing their environment as well. And that's not so mobile (hence the ability to tell India from America).
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Clearly, from observing the way a large minority of citizens are behaving (and believing) in the United States, learning to program computers is a relatively minuscule concern.
Rather, teaching this mass of ignorant anti-rational people how to think clearly, from facts, is critically important.
But mah diversity
Most kids are more interested in what kind of social shennanigans and petty politics they can get up to rather than working hard at something. Same as most adults. Most people could care less about being productive and useful in life, they just want to see how much they can grab through petty back-stabbing and bullshit games. Hence the popularity of worthless "Humanities" degrees. The only value of "Humanities Degree" is you you repeatedly crumble and uncrumble the piece of paper it is written on until the fibers break down and become somewhat soft, you can use it as an emergency piece of toilet paper.
*Forever * learning frameworks
As soon as you master one, it gets bloated and fractured and then the next one comes along fixing everything. There is a kxcd for this....
I resisted .NET for a long time on personal projects. Last month I started something ambitious, in C#, and I can crank out piles of functionality. Who needs to memorize when you have Google and stack overflow? And of course you can put ASM in a .dll and P/Invoke if you need the speed, but it's rare.
Coding slowly is not fun. Reusing tested code to save time is fun.
It's course correction. The 'EVERYONE MUST CODE!' initiatives were ludicrous to begin with. It was said a great deal at the time: not everyone wants to learn to code or has a natural interest in it, and no amount of bullying from tech companies is going to change that. It's as it should be, and this is what it looks like when only those with a real interest take a subject. Make it a math elective and let those who want to pursue it pursue it.
It's worth noting as well that more and more of our technology resembles appliance, and using that metaphor, very few people want to learn to fix other appliances like washing machines or care how they work (do you?). Silicon Valley got pretty full of itself there for awhile, so much of what has been proposed by them has been a riduculous, overly-hyped canard. What we are seeing now was pretty much inevitable, and it means things have re-stabilized from the ebb and flow and nothing more.
Obviously, if you lean publicity for stuff towards only women, men stop doing it.
Which industry will the feminazis attack next ?
...for minimum wage?
Thought so.
Feminazi sexism strikes again.
So this reminds me of the late 90's to early 2000's. During the dot com boom everyone was trying to get a tech job, Because it was seen as a good way to get a decent paying job. But a lot of the people I interviewed then weren't in it because they liked it or were interested. and while some were competent they weren't really talented as they had no "love" for the subject. Many of these never returned to tech after the dot com bust. I think there was a lot of press about millionaire/billionaires being made. But once again its following the money and while tech is still booming and employees needed the realization its actually hard work and a lot of journeyman coding is needed (not as glitzy as they hoped). I've been teaching programming for kids. Class attendance was great (started in early 2017) the first 12 months pretty good the next 6 months but really dropped off the last 6 months. The attended classes had great reviews. They all seemed to enjoy it. I think in this case the "darker side" and other bad press of tech companies in the news might having parent thing about pushing their kids to learn software.
2% sounds way too high. CS is the theory behind programming. Not all programmers need to be theoretical researchers, but most could benefit from some familiarity with the concepts. Out of 1000 students at my high school, I was the 1 programmer, and the only one who could have benefited from a CS class. What we had instead was a Pascal syntax class run out of the business school department, that I dropped on the second day.
That .1% seems like a more typical range, so out of a class of 20, the class is wasted on 19 of them. The other 980 knew better what they knew and were interested in, and didn't take the class.
Programming isn't for everyone. I'm tired of debugging your shitty Python.
Dudes back in control. Linus is notorious. Had nothing to do with women even
The vast majority of classes in Middle school and High school are required. There is a very small selection of elective classes, and even then, mostly in Senior year. So where these classes made as pure electives? Or could they chosen in place of a math class like Algebra 2 or geometry? If they are counted as credit in place of a required course, more people would chose to take them.
This is all paranoid conspiracy bullshit. There was never any evidence for Eric Raymond's claims. Now you're just layering perverse fantasy on top of evidence free claims.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Surely!
It cannot happen that some ideological extremists decided to frame someone and blackmail them in some way to further their own agenda. That only happens in movies or to people in a far far away land. Same as, say, suicide attempts.
you can not be a programmer or in IT. In many places the public education system is not functioning well and has basic graduation rates of 50-60%.
;)
Our public schools struggle to teach reading, writing and arthritic. After High School many students do not function at grade level and can not pass entry level college classes. How would they have the skill set to be a programmer or have a career in IT. Form that matter any STEM field.
Just my 2 cents
I wonder if the people being taught "programming" today know how to make a linked list. Do they know how to use semaphores, or even what semaphores are? Have they ever seen what their written program code looks like when translated by a compiler to machine code?
I'm retired now, thankfully, but my sense is that the folks being churned out today learn what libraries to call in specific languages/development suites, without much if any idea of what those libraries are really doing. They're taught to put the black boxes together, to fix the problem now now now. There's no thought of building a solution that will be stable and maintainable over time, since whatever gets thrown together will be replaced in a couple of years anyway.
I'm glad to be out of the industry, so I don't have to be worried anymore about being fired for someone younger, or replaced by someone on the other side of the planet. Many times people thinking about going into computer fields came to me for advise, and I warned them away from this dying profession.
Most technology jobs are crap.
No, don't let white boys get sucked into the trap of joining an industry where they have little chance of promotion, high chances of being replaced by someone either from or in India and China, and will be gotten rid long before they turn 40, or perhaps even 30.
Let the women and minorities do it, since at least they can sue for "discrimination" when they get replaced.
India is seeing wage increases, since everyone wants an appropriate level of compensation. Now, if the non-US programmers were as competent as their US counterparts, they would demand 1:1 compensation. I guess they're still admitting that they aren't as good.
Introducing logic in the curriculum has to be done early and comprehensibly enough to have the wanted effect. So do CS as applied mathematics. Learning business systems like office packages, databases and other common business-oriented languages might be better dealt with in combination the motivating business classes, as part of whatever comes after the basic education.
"Math is hard." Better to be an underpaid, but happy, cosmetologist than an unemployed computer programmer.
Sure, the top 5% of programmers still get decent work.
But no, they don't charge just as much. You're forgetting about training. US colleges are crazy expensive. You're also forgetting that US workers put in 50-60 hour work weeks while the guys overseas are doing 80. And we used to do 30-40 until we were forced to work harder to compete. Sure, they burn out, but there's literally a billion of them.
I don't really care that my oil filter's only good for 6000 miles when it's $20 bucks. That's because It's cheap, disposable, and good enough..
This is like War Games. The only winning move it not to play.
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Yes, yes, yes and yes. The thing is I went to school to learn how to ride a bike, they spent 4 fucking years teaching me how to make every itty bitty of the bike fom scratch, and I gad to learn to ride it on my own... great. Now at every fucking interview I have to regurtitate how every itty hitty piece of the bike is made, then they hand me the bike and tell me to ride it. And the bike is totalky fucked up, as if soneine who never seen one before made it, it has a dildo instead of a bicycle seat that constantly fucks you in the ass. And i'm told my job is to make sure there is enough tape holding it together, and if I even think about actualky fixing it I'lk be fired for wasting time.
Local control of education is an issue? Are you even trying to hide where your technocratic "utopia" is going to lead?
My company just hired a bunch of CS graduates right out of college. We also let go of a few project managers (who worked in a defunct product group) who got new jobs within a month.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
At the time I more or less retired, that kind of support was in its infancy. I'm glad to hear that things have gotten better in some respects.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
You made my day. Bless your heart.
Except Indians and Chinese are fucking stupid, low skilled, and will not deliver production ready code.
I've seen companies waste millions thinking they could deliver a production ready product using indian nig--gers and chinks.
Pennywise and pound foolish.
the "game" is being a CS major. Not being alive.
And when someone undercuts you it's with "good enough". That's how being undercut works. It's why we all use Microsoft Office instead of Word Perfect even though WP was hand coded in assembly and faster and more stable and didn't eat your documents for breakfast. Good enough was good enough.
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Are we talking about whites who don't want to be a minority in their own country? Because if so, I'm here to tell you that THEY'RE the rational ones.
Here's a fact: minorities get treated like shit, whatever the circumstances. Especially if whites aren't in the majority.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
That's a feature not a bug.
Then I wish you'd have worked with me. It would have been nice to have a knowledgable coworker for a change.
rent-duh-k0d3rz are a dime a dozen. what we NEED is more plumbers, welders, material handlers, fruit and vegetable pickers, truck loaders...
and the alleged quality of 'merkin code is just as bad. why? because they're fucking stupid, and low skilled. I've seen companies waste millions thinking they could deliver a production ready product using 'merkins to k0d3.
I am late to checking my rss inbox, but has there been a good deep dive to the problems in development that might turn people off? James Damore comes to mind as someone that tried to genuinely bring up an issue, but well didn't work out so well to actually address anything. This and other issues could really turn potential CS students. I have seen to too much arm chair logic that has no research behind it, "You know why people don't go for CS", then a reason based on no research
yeah because conspiracy driven ideological zealots that make up the current social justice crowd never engage in witchunts.
With everything being outsourced to India or H1Bs from India, why would any American kid go into skyrocketing college debt for a computer science degree?
By drawing a penis on the forehead.
Face it people, The only participation they got was from teachers who could participate by doing nothing and claiming credit towards promotion or raises from their local government. Most of them just don't care about advancing STEM or CS education. They are only teachers because they can't handle the stress of a real job where they don't have some number of people to lord it over. And the number of positions at the DMV is limited.
CS education will improve by making materials available to students online for free and hopefully organizing and indexing it to an extent that it's not like dealing with the google search that returns 200,000 entries and the first several pages are obviously not what you wanted.
I think all students should learn to code, just like all students should learn to do algebra, or find the intersection of two linear equations, or write an essay.
But the end goal is not to make everyone programmers. The end goal is to make people well rounded, aware of how things work, because in most jobs, you benefit from understanding how computers work. And if you can code at all, you understand how they work in a fundamental way.
Yeah, you miss the part where such a conspiracy wouldn't actually work in the real world because it's fucking stupid given it relies upon idiotic views about what Feminists supposedly "do" rather than what they can do and succeed at doing.
Are we talking about whites who don't want to be a minority in their own country?
By "their own country", do you mean the country they invaded a couple of centuries ago?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Here's a fact: minorities get treated like shit, whatever the circumstances.
Have you considered not treating minorities like shit? I know it's a really out there proposal, but it might just work.
I was a COBOL mainframe programmer from 1976 to 2000.
The only computer stuff I leaned in college (Florida State University) was FORTRAN, COBOL and BASIC. The mainframe was in the basement of the math building and we actually used IBM key punches and Hollerith cards. The mainframe was a CDC 6400. It could barely handle COBOL. Someone remarked that the government required a COBOL compiler or else it would not have had one.
I got a programmer trainee job in Chicago in November 1976. All I knew was COBOL. I was taught OS/MVS JCL and VSAM.
I taught myself IDMS, IMS DB/DC, DB2 and CICS. And probably some other stuff that I have forgotten about.
Mainframe programming was fun in the 1980s. Especially when we got terminals (not PCs) on our desks. Even ATT&T had a room full of terminals and one had to wait one's turn to get your work done. I did all new development and the pay was great. As a consultant I got time and a half for over time.
I got my last mainframe job in Dallas. The mistake I made was demonstrating that I could debug production programs in the middle of the night quickly. I was the only programmer analyst on the floor with a beeper that was on call 24/7.
I guess I saw one dumb mistake too many by some new developer because I finally said to hell with it. Being woken up in the middle of the night for one more OC7 abend was just too much; an OC7 is a data exception.
I still play around with C on my PC but a friend and I, both of us are retired military; him army active duty and me the army reserves, are just about to start a housing related business. He will do the housing stuff and I will do the PC stuff; accounting and stuff.
I still have dreams about programming, fortunately less and less, but I don't miss it.
Except that working remotely is nothing like being in the same office with your coworkers.
The company I work for has software engineering offices on either coast of USA, Ireland (where I work), and India. For one's the there's the time zone woes - we only get at most a few working hours in common with any other office, and there's no hours in common between all offices. Teleconferencing is not pleasant. Phones and video connections are still far from perfect, so it's much easier to make yourself understood if you're in the same room as the other people. You can draw stuff on a whiteboard, gesture, draw attention to a screen that can't be quickly shared to everyone else. Having a remote worker on a different time zone is very difficult if you wish to integrate them into the local office, because it requires much co-ordination, whereas in the same office you can just walk over to a coworkers desk and chat, or set up a meeting in minutes.
For another, you build real camaraderie with people in your office. Working full time, you spend more time (excluding sleep) with them most days than with a romantic partner. Some of my coworkers play football (the real kind) together, I practice archery with some a few evenings per week and talk about electronics or metal working most mornings with a few other like minded coworkers. Others organize a social event most Fridays. We do use instant messaging and email, but those interactions are nearly all perfunctory (though generally productive especially when the issue at hand is well understood). And then there's cultural and personal biases that are more likely to be shared if you're working with people living in the same society as you do - this makes communication a lot easier between people in the same office than remotely, because it's easier to relate to them.
I'm not saying that working remotely is necessarily bad. I can understand that it's probably good for business, but it's closer to contract work than a well running office.
You found the MAGAt
Yes, we do. I did a CS course at a decent university. We were taught ARM assembly, systems programming in C, algorithms, a bunch of networking modules of varying depth and scope, low level processor architecture (culminated in an assignment to make a CPU simple in VHDL, mine worked just barely). There were also modules that looked at OS functionality and scheduling, and yes we were taught about semaphores and mutexes and preemption. There was also a module on computer architecture where we explored cache coherence algorithms and implemented various mutex systems on x86 (turns out ticket locks are pretty good). We were taught nothing about libraries or frameworks - it was generally implied that it is something you can learn or build on your own.
At my job, we do tend to build stuff that is stable and maintainable over time (though the time span isn't quite decades and there is planned obsolescence). Formal documentation is a bit sparse, but code quality is good enough that with a bit of domain knowledge you can tell what's going on. It's not the same at all companies. Not-invented-here syndrome actually means that stuff will be re-implemented (or at least wrapped) better than the original.
And it is not a dying profession, not at all. It's just that the barrier to entry is high. It's certainly not for everyone.
Code.org was from the start a scam to saturate the CS labor pool to attain cheaper talent. The issue with the whole idea is that there's only so many people capable of actually thinking on the level required to take up transcribing their thoughts and making machines obey them, let alone transcribing the thoughts of other people to make the machines obey those. So basically a bunch of corrupt businessmen and market makers decided "labor is too expensive, we need a scam to make it cheaper" and ended up blowing a shitload of money to learn the hard way that "wow, you really can't teach the retarded masses." Whether they will internalize that to the level required to understand "the programmers are actually smarter than us" is another matter, chances are their egos will prevent that.
Instead of focusing on High school, focus efforts at COmmunity College levels.
In particular, if student takes a particular coding class, and passes it, then pay a % of for the students tuition.
Assume that this was an intro CS class. If they get an A, pay 66%. B? pay 50%. c? Pay 33%.
Once they get up higher, say Algorithms/Data Structures, pay 100% on A, 75% on B, and 50% on C.
Finally, once into upper-end classes that can help a company directly, then pay 100/90/60 on A/B/C.
The point being that if Society, specifically, companies like Google and Microsoft are really short, then getting students to switch to CS and not have a debt,will make a huge difference.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Social Just-Us Nazis sure do hate being called out on their reprehensible behavior.
That is supposed to be part of a good college degree. The issue lies in the universities trying to cater too much to the students. After all, Business majors have not required ethics until just recently and it is a joke from what I have seen.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hey, I was born in the USA less than two centuries ago, and I never invaded anything.
It doesn't matter, though, since if you include ancestry we are ALL immigrants if you go back far enough.
And we are ALL minorities in one trait or another. I'm in the under-height minority among others, and I *am* discriminated against on that trait. You can pick any arbitrary trait you like for yourself.
But the bike is Agile(tm)!
In my kids school. They work hard to ensure only the minimum is taught.
That's why you need to expose kids to CS, and a wide variety of other subjects. How else are they going to know if they like it?
Just another day in Paradise
Maybe, we can actually do more than one thing at a time. In fact, maybe teaching CS will help people think logically.
Just another day in Paradise
You do realize that "native-Americans" immigrated here as well, don't you?
Just another day in Paradise
They make a ton of money though.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/2...
By "their own country", do you mean the country they invaded a couple of centuries ago?
The country? The natives were stone age tribes. There was no country.
I wonder if the people being taught "programming" today know how to make a linked list. Do they know how to use semaphores, or even what semaphores are? Have they ever seen what their written program code looks like when translated by a compiler to machine code?
Speaking for the people I work with the answers are yes, yes, and maybe. Modern processors are too advanced for anyone to effectively hand-write assembly code.
I've written embedded C code for microprocessors, and now I'm writing server-side code for one of the big five. What I'm doing now is much harder. First, there's just so much to know. When I was writing C code, there was just the application and OS services. Building a modern massively scaled internet application is vastly more complicated.
> You do realize that "native-Americans" immigrated here as well, don't you?
Yeah, thousands of years ago!
If anyone can lay a legitimate claim to a land, I think "we've been here since prehistoric times" is a pretty good qualification.