Programming — Now Starting In Elementary School 162
the agent man writes "The idea of getting kids interested in programming in spite of their common perception of programming to be 'hard and boring' is an ongoing Slashdot discussion. With support of the National Science Foundation, the Scalable Game Design project has explored how to bring computer science education into the curriculum of middle and high schools for some time. The results are overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that game design is highly motivational across gender and ethnicity lines. The project is also finding new ways of tracking programming skills transferring from game design to STEM simulation building. This NPR story highlights an early and unplanned foray into bringing game-design based computer science education even to elementary schools."
What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:5, Interesting)
I took programming in 3rd and 4th grades. In 3rd grade we started with logo, and then in 4th grade we started writing in BASIC.
That was standard curriculum throughout the State back in the early 80s.
Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Same - I was using Logo in 3rd grade, back in '96 or so. Loved that turtle.
Weirdly, programming disappeared from my curriculum until high school, when I was started on Java. Of course, I taught myself in the mean time - Basic, C++, Java, and so on. Tried teaching myself assembly - did not go so well.
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That was very much the mode in those days.
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I taught myself in the mean time
That was very much the mode in those days
I do not know about "those days" or "these days", but, as far as I know, I've been teaching myself all these while, since early 1980's
And it's still continuing
If the kids "these days" do not know anything about "teaching themselves" skills that they need, I can only say that I feel sad for them
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That was very much the mode in those days.
Self taught also, as no classes were available for me until high school. I wonder if my experience is average?
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I started teaching myself Fortran in 7th grade when I got my Ham Radio license and heard that it was the program of choice for modeling Antennas. Of course, I was not aware of this whole calculus thing, so I couldn't actually write my first antenna modeling program until 8th grade after my dad taught me calculus over the summer.
Math is another subject we seriously need to accelerate. High School just doesn't teach enough Math, even in AP. High school graduates pursuing STEM degrees need to have a firm grasp
Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously-- there's no reason we shouldn't be teaching Algebra from the *very beginning*. I mean, come on.. what's the difference between 1 + _ = 2 and 1 + x = 2? You're figuring out the exact same thing!! The only reason I can think that we can't introduce Algebra from the start is that it scares the heck out of the teachers.
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Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:4, Interesting)
Elementary math is memorization and learning a mechanical system of computing. Algebra relies more on symbolic thought.
That said, I think that algebra could be taught a few years earlier. I remember seeing it for the first time in 8th grade and thinking, "Oh, wow, this is just like variables in BASIC!"
Depends horw its taught (Score:2)
If you just drill in the procedure then yes. But I asked my daughter (6 years old in grade K) what 60 + 20 is. She didn't get it, but I asked things like "how many 10s in 60?" She said 6. I asked how may 10s in 20. She said 2. So I ask how many 10s in 80. She thinks, she then says 8. So what's 60 + 20. 80. This is all while we're driving somewhere, so no looking at numbers on paper or anything. If you think about it, adding 10's
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I used pencils to teach algebra to my youger sister when she was trying to learn multiplication (that means, she was a bit older than 6). In the end, as I suspected, those procedures are way easier to grasp using algebra than directly memorizing the producs table.
When I learned that, I used BASIC and discovered a few rules. But I didn't have a full grasp of algebra to help me.
Algrebra first time in 8th grade (Score:2)
Yeah I remember seeing Algebra for the first time in the 8th grade. And I remember my first thought, "My calculator doesn't have any letters on it!"
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I dunno... I have a 6-year-old and I sit her in front of Khan Academy and she loves it. I love it, too - it is really fun to see her grasp these concepts for the first time. At the same time, so far all she has learned is counting up and down a number line and variations thereof. So far, more advanced lessons haven't "taken". I'm quite certain that algebra is too advanced for her at this stage. I'm sure I could teach her how to move things from one side to another in an equation, but she wouldn't be able to
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The only reason I can think that we can't introduce Algebra from the start is that it scares the heck out of the parents.
FTFY
A lot of the problem isn't the teachers - it's the dumbass parents who think "their babies" can't handle Shakespeare, or Al-gee-brah, or the history of any country that isn't 'MURICAH!
Yeah, you can probably blame a bit of it on the teachers, and on the students, and quite a bit on the government's continual lack of funding and constant barrage of tests and requirements, but a lot of the problem comes from the dumbass parents.
Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Laptops? They barely had enough funding to get those for the teachers that needed them, never mind the students.
"HD" projectors (ie. 1024x768) and electronic whiteboards I'll concede to, but they're also actually useful - teachers can write notes on the board and just *save* them. Sure beats the old transparencies, in any case, which were usually so faded and yellowed that they were barely legible. And it also simultaneously replaces the crappy TV-on-a-cart used for any videos. Sometimes "wasteful" spending
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I can't comment on your specific school district, but on average the US spends more per-pupal than just about any other country (I think we're number 2?). We rank far lower in achievement... money ain't the problem.
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Just because our per-pupil spending is high doesn't mean we spend a lot directly on each pupil. It just means we spend a lot, and then divide by the number of students. Much of the money appears to go to textbook publishers and administrators.
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This is exactly my point - education in the US is not that great, but it's not because we are unwilling to fund the schools - in aggregate they are very well-funded.
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It's not bullshit - we spend, as a nation, more than enough on education.
I don't claim to be an expert on education, and I don't know what's wrong with it. It could be that schools aren't funded in a fair manner. It could be that corruption is to blame. It could be that our incentive systems are all screwed up for teachers, parents, students, or all of them. But the simple fact is, throwing even more money at the schools is foolish. Spending more money than almost any other country, with fairly dismal resul
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I agree entirely, but organizing schools correctly is socialism. America can't have that!
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Those idiots forced me to spend half my school time on arts and crafts, home economics, and other stuff that I had zero interest in, and it was a waste of my time and theirs.
We need to put a system in place to identify where kids are going at a young age and put them into schools that allow them to pursue those interests. The people who currently control our education system seem hell-bent on stamping out a bunch of identical automatons, and it's just wrong.
I feel like these two sentences are somewhat contradictory - they are trying to expose you to varied subjects as opposed to setting you on an unalterable course. In the British system, they pretty much have your career pegged by the time you are 11 and you specialize from then on. In my wife's case, this essentially pushed her towards a J.D., and she ultimately hated it and went back to school for an M.D.
I know that my wife's case is not any more statistically valid than your single case, but I want
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. Teacher: How much is 1+1?
Class: 2
Teacher: if 1+x = 2, what's x?
Class: 1
Teacher: You're doing algebra.
I was convinced. It wasn't until I hit my undergraduate group theory class that I started thinking maybe I can't really do algebra (but I repeated the class, group theory, that is, and convinced myself I really could do it)
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Some curricula do exactly that. My kids have been using Miquon Math for years, and I was surprised to see the worksheets have exactly that type of 1 + _ = 2 problems, even in early grades.
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High School just doesn't teach enough Math
I wasn't aware that it taught math at all. Well, it teaches students how to memorize formulas, but that's about it. Let's try to improve schools before we "accelerate" any of the material.
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High School just doesn't teach enough Math
I wasn't aware that it taught math at all. Well, it teaches students how to memorize formulas, but that's about it. Let's try to improve schools before we "accelerate" any of the material.
I remember sitting in my HS Calculus class, listening to the teacher explain a topic to the class that I already grasped. As she went over the specifics, I started to wonder why anyone would explain it that way. It was such a bizarre approach to the material. And then it hit me. She didn't actually understand what she was teaching, she had simply memorized it. It was a "This method will solve this problem for you. I don't know why though" approach. Rather unsettling experience.
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Modern CPUs are too complex to learn Assembly on them. I learned on an IMS6100, basically a single chip PDP-8. It had a RISC-y instruction set that you knew by heart within a week. Same thing a little later with the 6502. Even the 8086/8088 was tolerable. It started to get hairy with the 386. It's like C++: TIMTOWTDI and everybody uses a subset.
I'd start learning on an emulated old 8-bitter, maybe a C64 emulator.
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amd64 is not too bad, it cleans up i386 stuff quite a bit. but ARM asm is where things get super easy. I don't understand why people are buying AVR and PIC microcontrollers, or why stuff like Arduino is popular, when an ARM microcontroller is as cheap and is easier to program. (yes, you can get a cortex-m0 for under $2 now)
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Oh that sounds good. I'm waiting for a Pi...
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Same - I was using Logo in 3rd grade, back in '96 or so. Loved that turtle.
Cant help but feel that in all likelihood what they learn there has a good chance of being utterly redundant or irrelevant by the time they are old enough to make use of it. Why not instead teach them the kind of programming orientated maths and logic?
Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it won't be "irrelevant", because it's some of the most fundamental elements of programming.
Things I learned in that Logo class:
variables and assignment
IF-THEN-ELSE statements
WHILE loops
FOR loops
GOTO
Functions
With the exception of that last one, what, really, is different in modern programming? I still use every one of those, every day, except the goto.
The syntax is unimportant. The API is unimportant, as long as it's simple, and visual enough for a third-grader to "see" the results of his program. The important thing is teaching the basic programming elements. Hell, the important thing at that age is teaching that a computer is just a machine, that it's not some magic box. I've seen *adults* who can't grasp why a computer is doing what they told it instead of what they want.
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Pre-emptively correcting myself before someone bitches at me: My "with the exception of that last one" was supposed to refer to the GOTO - I added Functions to the list while revising.
Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Logo's better than you think.
It is a scheme like language:
world model --> initial environment
procedure level -> nested environment
turtles --> thread environment
It revolves around a built-in actor model funnily named turtles.
An implementation of a multithreaded logo interpreter is trivial because of that.
If Logo was compiled to byte-code or machine code using a modern compiler it would be a competitive language assumed it had a decent library or the capability to call to other languages transparently.
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I forgot to add that it is deeply recursive (most Spirograph, like those taught to kids using logo, are instances of L-system fractals) so it's interpreter usually supported tail recursion properly.
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Logo and Basic (Apple IIE) around 3rd grade was my start as well. :)
Art of Assembly (Score:2)
Art of Assembly [mac.com]
I taught myself Assembly before I took the class at the university. I really enjoyed the original draft of the book.
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My thinking is that when you're talking about young kids, they'd be open to it, but the school district would have to have the funding, patience, and po
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Re:What do you mean, "now" starting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. Started BASIC in 3rd grade at public elementary school in Tampa. Fast forward today: I asked my son what they do in his computer class, and he said "we made a song in Garage Band". WTF
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I took programming in 3rd and 4th grades. In 3rd grade we started with logo, and then in 4th grade we started writing in BASIC.
That was standard curriculum throughout the State back in the early 80s.
yes, WAS! Programming has been tried before, in some way or another, even in Elementary Schools. However, these programs did not stick. At the high school level there are some CS AP courses but in general they are doing quite terrible especially with female and minority students. At the middle school level there are very few programming related activities. At the elementary school level there is basically nothing in US schools.
Unlike with the programming found in schools in the 80ies there is now some evid
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Ditto. My parents signed me up for computer classes for BASIC. In sixth grade, I had a geek teacher, Mr. Mangel (is he on /.?) who taught us Apple 2 LOGO. He even had an awesome robotic turtle, like a slow plotter, that drew on big papers! That was radical/rad. :)
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I started in 4th grade on an Apple ][e in 1985. I was the first kid in the class to figure out how to do animation, as a result of a bug in my code.
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Amazing as it sounds, I had the same experience in backwards Greece in the early nineties. LOGO and BASIC in 4th and 5th grade (elementary school has six grades in us). So why the news?
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For me it wasn't standard curriculum, but we did have around 5 Commodore 64s in grades 5 and 6, and probably about half the class took the opportunity to learn C64 BASIC. It helped that we could to some degree control our learning in that class... not everyone is so lucky.
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Back in the TRS 80 / Sinclair days, you generally had to copy games from a magazine into the basic interpreter. Not really programming, but you learned something from it.
I also took a few courses in elementary school, but did not program anything for real until middle / high school.
After judging FLL Middle School robotics for a while, the lack of anything on the programming side scares me a lot. They all seem to use very simple programs without any real structure or even sensor feedback. It worries me.
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Statistics of motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's a running joke among many of my friends that every student in Computer Science got into the field to make video games, though most of them won't admit that publicly.
CoderDojo teaching kids to code (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's what it looks like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMODHilE4qk [youtube.com]
A shrinking market (Score:2)
great thing to get kids interested in early, so by the time they reach working age, there wont be job..
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Just because the hardware's made in China (we'll see how long that lasts, but that's another issue) doesn't mean the software won't be
Fixed.
Manufacturing has headed to China. And engineering has been moving with it. Somehow the software won't?
You're delusional and whistling by the graveyard.
--
BMO
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And the United States is doomed, we should all lay down and slowly starve.
What does this kind of thinking actually accomplish?
China is doing very well, the US can too. We have a ton of exceptionally smart, talented people, and we need positive, forward thinking attitudes to keep them interested. Imagine the typical high school student mildly interested in computer science reading this discussion right now. What kind of message are you sending? You're basically telling him to abandon all hope and go into the
Re:A shrinking market (Score:5, Interesting)
And the United States is doomed
We are, unless things drastically change in politics and the boards of corporations. This is a matter of facts on the ground. It's not open to debate. It's happening.
we should all lay down and slowly starve.
We won't have any choice if things don't change.
We have been handing technology, as a society, to the Chinese for decades now, with the delusional belief that all the high-end stuff will still happen here. I believe it started with Voc-Ed being a place to dump the "dummy" students. This is how I believe we lost the skills to make anything here - that we systematically decided that making anything = sweatshop and if you were smart, you didn't go into manufacturing, ever. We denigrated actual work for decades and anyone who worked in a factory making anything was therefore just some dumb monkey. And you can replace monkeys on one side of the planet with monkeys from another side. That's the thinking that got us here.^1
But transferring the manufacturing base over to China makes it inconvenient for the engineering and software to happen here, so guess where it's going to move.
Go ahead, guess.
Engineers and scientists are already moving to Shanghai.
Unless we stop the haemorrhaging and start building up our own manufacturing base here encouraging students to go into STEM without learning Chinese is a joke and a half.
But I don't see that happening any time soon.
--
BMO
Postscript: I was looking at a Popular Mechanics from the 1950s and there was articles that went on for pages on how to use a shaper and a tip on how to turn a taper using ball bearings instead of ordinary conical centers , and it was just *there* as if machining was a skill that many people had. You don't publish an article in a popular magazine where you deliberate write over the heads over your readers or write something they don't care about. It was expected that the readers of the 1954 Popular Mechanics^2 would find this stuff applicable. Today you would *never* find such an article in a mainstream magazine such as that.
Footnotes:
1. The war on work: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html [ted.com]
The first half goes on about castrating sheep. But that's the set-up for the second half, so watch the whole thing.
2. http://books.google.com/books?id=Nt8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA126&dq=1954%20Popular%20Mechanics&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=true [google.com]
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Alright, you make some good points, but I'd argue that manufacturing jobs are leaving center stage anyway.
Look around, we build factories that require a tenth of the labor they used to. We build entire shipping centers that are more or less automated. I'm not sure that we really need manufacturing anymore. If anything China is serving as an excellent stop-gap to ease the transition to a much different kind of society.
I mean, when you get down to it, the problem is really that the amount of product per singl
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1. Not everyone can be an engineer.
2. An engineer who does not how to manufacture is a pretty fuckin' poor engineer and makes it painful for everyone else who has to deal with his shit downstream.
--
BMO
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Engineering can go to China, but science won't (not for a while). Nobody trusts Chinese or Indian publications and institutions not to be rampantly fraudulent.
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"Those Japanese will never make a car as good as the Americans."
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BMO
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Normally I would agree with you (I certainly do on manufacturing). However, scientific honesty is a matter of culture and values. The impact factor on Chinese publications won't go up until they start to deemphasize quantity of publications in favor of fewer, better publications.
American science has actually been suffering the same problem and, presto change-o, has suddenly acquired a reputation for being fraudulent or unreliable on "certain subjects".
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One point I tried hammering home indirectly in my other posts was that the Chinese are going to adopt western-style scientific research and engineering whether they want to or not. Whether *we* want them to or not. The Japanese and Koreans went through the same growing pains. To expect the Chinese to be somehow oblivious/stupid is hubris on our part. They are just people, after all, just like us.
"'What one monkey can do, another can' - Ancient Simian Proverb" - Calculus Made Easy by Sylvanus P. Thompson
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You're missing my point. The incentive structure is lacking for Chinese scientists to adopt the values and methods of Western science. They simply aren't paid for high-quality studies with replicable results and high impact. They're paid to pump out papers and get cited, as much as possible. Instead of Chinese scientists adopting the Western way, both Chinese and Western scientists have been adapting the ultra-capitalist way: quantity over quality in a competition to the death.
You'll have to resocialize
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I'm going to have to agree with you on that. I'm not sure about the scale, but publish-or-perish has led to a lot of junk papers.
--
BMO
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Manufacturing has headed to China. And engineering has been moving with it. Somehow the software won't?
The whole "outsourcing to cheaper labor countries" is only temporary, it will sort itself out eventually. Either salaries rise in China, or they drop at our end. At that point, producing near consumption starts to make sense again.
Sure, it might get nasty in between...
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"might" is a pretty big understatement.
Put it this way, unless you have people who can afford your products, your products are not going to get bought. And captains of industry in the US have been ignoring this obvious fact stated in plain terms by Henry Ford himself. Manufacturing isn't always the largest part of the economy, but it drives a lot of other industries in parallel with it.
Germany has always had a decent manufacturing base, and at this last downturn, they are still the strongest economy in Eu
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Sure, there will be some people left coding, but in a practical sense the days are limited that makes its a viable career choice.
For most people canned software is 'good enough' and RAD tools are getting to the point even a non programmer can create something usable on modern hardware. ( great, no, but usable ).
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Shrinking market? Do you live in a mayonnaise jar? Right now there's a severe shortage of people who are competent at programming, and there's no reason this will decrease in the near term as we move more and more stuff online.
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Right now there's a severe shortage of people who are competent at programming, and there's no reason this will decrease in the near term as we move more and more stuff online.
if there is a shrinking number of competent programmers, why are networking groups filed with them? could it be that they are over 40, out of work for more than 3 months, no tattoos and have families? yes, there are also rans but I've found people with talent and wisdom within 15 minutes of working the room, people that I would have hired when I was a hiring manager.
employers need to try different modes of working. for example I'm looking to find a part time gig (contract) where I can trade rate for lear
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So much of a shortage that they want ten years experience in things that have only existed for five, fluent Maltese and Latvian, grade three piano and ideally Scorpio or Sagittarius. Left handers only.
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there wont be job anywhy for dikked who writing like you
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How do you mean "there wont be job"? I thought elementary school was for giving kids a basic set of knowledge and skills, not to train them for any specific line of work. Programming teaches analytic thinking, logic, and gives some insight into how computers work and what sort of things they can and cannot do for you. These are useful skills to have in life, even if you don't actually end up developing software for a living.
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The only jobs left are high-end jobs that require a LOT of training - doctors, dentists, lawyers, therapists - and the job of automating everything else. Believe it, the automators are going after those other occupations over the next several decades too. It's going to take a long time.
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Ok, let's forget that this is elementary school, where kids learn every kind of stuff that will make them adults, not professionals.
You mean, there won't be a market? Why would that be the case? Computers will be less usefull? People won't have enough money to pay (and computers won't be usefull for the production of basic goods)? Is there a third possibility I'm not aware of?
Programming is treated as too "mystical" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Programming is treated as too "mystical" (Score:5, Funny)
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I wouldn't worry about it. Math has the same rep, and it's been taught in schools for millennia.
generalize to problem solving (Score:5, Insightful)
Programming is not special. Programming is the literacy of problem solving.
Facing a required task and then using known tools to construct a method the achieve the required task in logical steps.
There should be less emphasis on "programming" and more on general problem solving. Learning the general method is better than learning the specific method until you need to become as master of the specific method.
Programming can be one aspect of teaching problem solving because programming is very structured. However problem solving skills in general need to raised a lot higher than general grade school level before real programming can be done.
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Yes. This.
Programming isn't an end to itself. Programming is a means to an end, and it's a lot of fun to pick an end and find a means to it. Kids need to learn that using their brains is fun, whether that means programming or something else.
For me, the 70's (Score:2)
— baby, —! (Score:2)
Leave them kids alone! (Score:2)
All you know you just a
another block of the Code!
Fresh meat for the grinder (Score:2)
More fresh meat for the game companies who need armies of overworked and underpaid programmers.
Agentsheets is closed source, proprietary , costly (Score:2)
This appears to be more an "enrichment" program for the owners of agentsheets.
What a great way to spend scarce funding.
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Scratch and squeak are featured on the OLPC. BYOB is used at Berkeley in their "The Beauty and Joy of Computing" non-CS undergrad course.
Everyone should care about what is being pushed on kids by the NSF, at a costs to taxpayers of $45 a seat, when better tools are available for free.
About agentshee
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Yes, I just participated in fixing a bug in the 8250.c driver in Linux. What have you done?
All of your posts are advertisements for Agentsheets(TM). I have looked at your slashdot history and have verified this fact.
Smalltalk, Squeak, Scratch, BYOB? all federally funded? That isn't what I pointed out, Pay attention! Those tools are free to schools.
The fact is, Agentsheets charges for their product, by the seat.
The problem
It is never too early to program (Score:2)
I didn't even understand written English. I just typed in what I read in a book.
Then I graduated to Print rockets.
Once I learned what IF/THEN did when I was 12, I felt the world open up.
Ignoring the Actual Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that we don't teach them algebra soon enough, it's that we don't teach them how to think (read: at all). It's not that mathematics doesn't teach people how to think, it does. But only in some kind of sneaky way, and people are assumed to have great logical deduction abilities like it's some inherent intuitive concept. But it doesn't work that way.
Unless you attended a rich and large high school, chances are your exposure to any level of logic is nil. Why is it only philosophy majors are the ones forced to take informal logic (and not even very much at that)? The only way you actually get an adequate exposure to formal education in rational thinking is if you're a logician.
But really I'm just deluding myself, who wants a workforce that knows how to think?
Mod the parent up (Score:2)
I'd mod you up if I had the points.
The GP makes it look like there is some world wide conspiracy to make children dumb. That's not the case, it is just that our society prioritizes other stuff, and most of the smart people aren't teaching kids.
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Ha... I'm now a professional programmer but I knew something funny was going on when I was a heck of a lot better than everyone else in my class at Rocky's Boots back in the 80s. The one other guy who was good at it is also a programmer now.