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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.
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!
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.
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"
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"
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.
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.
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.
?!
why do you jump to conclusion that a job one is good at, and can enjoy, and give meaning and satisfaction to life, pays minimum wage?
not very good with logic are you? at any rate we know cs is not for you!
No I follow that logic, if money doesn't matter then you would do your current job even if it paid minimum wage because you love it so much.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
why assume a minimum wage job that is so low in demand, easily fulfilled by anyone, requiring no special skills, satisfying no special need, and having no other characteristic which gives job holder fulfillment, be the choice of anyone looking for a life long career that gives meaning and satisfaction to life? too great a logical jump.
there maybe a minimum wage job that gives fulfillment to some, but those people would be a small percentage, and probably in such cases, specific individual context in which the job is done, give job holders other satisfactions and benefits, that fulfill them; they probably wont do a similar job in another context.
there may be others holding a minimum wage job, while they prepare for or create some other career (say as an artist etc), but then minimum wage isn't the career choice.
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.
Ok but now you're saying stuff that has nothing to do with what you originally said. The question isn't whether minimum wage jobs and satisfying or not satisfying but whether you would do your current job for minimum wage. This logic seems to follow, given that you don't care what a job pays you.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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
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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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)
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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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
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.
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.
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.
To be fair sittingnut did say that "pay .. should be a secondary consideration", not that pay should not matter at all. Still, the notion that one should prefer a minimum wage job (over a higher paying one) because the job fulfills a more important need than monetary pay is still a valid conclusion from their argument.
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.
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.
But the bike is Agile(tm)!
Ok but now you're saying stuff that has nothing to do with what you originally said. The question isn't whether minimum wage jobs and satisfying or not satisfying but whether you would do your current job for minimum wage. This logic seems to follow, given that you don't care what a job pays you.
you obviously didn't read or understand the full thread. "satisfaction", fulfillment, etc being the primary criteria in which to choose a career was my original (and consistent) point. jumping from that to question about minimum wage job, is too great a logical jump as i pointed out in my last comment.
two subjects seem to have (as you say) "nothing to do with" each other; i would say they are connected by that unwarranted logical jump by ac.
In my kids school. They work hard to ensure only the minimum is taught.
That's like saying looks aren't an important parameter in choosing a spouse. We all have minimum standards.
Just another day in Paradise
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
The Indians and Chinese aren't stupid, the managers that expect offshore consulting companies to deliver novel software projects with minimally trained people are stupid. The offshore workers are doing their best to have a life.
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.