I work in a small midwestern school district as a teacher/technology director. The questions about why students are not being taught programming is that there is very little interest. Looking at the posts, I believe that if you read this article, you can consider yourself somewhat of a nerd, obviously you had a lot of interest in computers. Most kids these days are not at all interested in computers past the point of instant messaging and web browsing. I do teach some programming, but I attack it from a different angle. I use the LEGO mindstorm robotic kits. I spend several weeks teaching the basic concepts of programming such as loops, goto's, if-than-else statements and try to get them to think programatically (I don't think that's a word but oh well). The interface is that of a drag and drop system using icons instead of words. Sometimes it's all I can do to find a couple people in each class that finds this somewhat interesting and wants to "figure it all out". So there are some schools trying to teach the basics.
Some people on this list are complaining about lock down computers, we can barely fund the computers, not the amount of staff and computer technology to fix everything that students fix. There are a lot of tools to restore to original conditions, but even these have their fallbacks.
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I work in a small midwestern school district as a teacher/technology director. The questions about why students are not being taught programming is that there is very little interest. Looking at the posts, I believe that if you read this article, you can consider yourself somewhat of a nerd, obviously you had a lot of interest in computers. Most kids these days are not at all interested in computers past the point of instant messaging and web browsing. I do teach some programming, but I attack it from a different angle. I use the LEGO mindstorm robotic kits. I spend several weeks teaching the basic concepts of programming such as loops, goto's, if-than-else statements and try to get them to think programatically (I don't think that's a word but oh well). The interface is that of a drag and drop system using icons instead of words. Sometimes it's all I can do to find a couple people in each class that finds this somewhat interesting and wants to "figure it all out". So there are some schools trying to teach the basics. Some people on this list are complaining about lock down computers, we can barely fund the computers, not the amount of staff and computer technology to fix everything that students fix. There are a lot of tools to restore to original conditions, but even these have their fallbacks.