How Early Should Kids Learn To Code? 299
the agent man writes "Wired Magazine is exploring how early kids should learn to code. One of the challenges is to find the proper time in schools to teach programming. Are teachers at elementary and middle school levels really able to teach this subject? The article suggests that even very young kids can learn to program and lists a couple of early experiments as well as more established ideas including the Scalable Game Design curriculum. However, the article also suggests that programming may have to come at the cost of Foreign language learning and music."
Re:That's fairly easy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"At the const of" language skills? (Score:4, Informative)
That's absurd. Learning time-sensitive ordered tasks, such as in music or dance, or alternative ways to express similar ideas, such as language skills, are invaluable to skilled programmers. The ideas of checklists, logical operations, and revising a program on the basis of alternate events, learning about backup and what you can lose without it, are all useful.
I'd be more concerned about what happens with _bad_ programming lessons, being taught to manipulate only GUI based patterns in a teacher expected way or be marked down for not doing it the way an uninformed, underpaid coding monkey wrote to mark the checksheet off their daily tasks and pays no attention to encouraging the children to learn how things work. I'm concerned tht the children will be taught only how to fill out a checklist blindly. I've worked with programmers taught that way, and they can become an active obstacle to good computing, good science, or even good politics.
I'm afraid that a lot of the pre-teen children I've been meeting in public school would be better off, though, with real recess or a daily siesta rather than yet another mandatory lesson that requires sitting in a computer classroom. They're exhausted, and getting their bodies moving is being neglected in conflicting academic policies and goals.
Finally someone who is paying attention to children's physiology. Their sleeping patterns are different from adults, and they do require additional sleep (and depending on their age, different nutritional content.)
Also, as you said, it is important to give precedence to more fundamental, cognitive/social skills. Slashdot is infected by too many keyboard warriors that think coding should become a basic, fundamental topic. It is not.
Don't rush kids into learning to code. Get them to learn the essentials first, math/algebra, natural sciences, language, history, civics and the basics of personal finance. All that, in particular personal finance, are more important that learning to code. We have a lot of shitty coders as it is, and a lot of people who suck at the basics of math, history, civics and logical thinking. What the do people think it's going to happen when we rush/force kids to learn to code?
Also, who is going to teach coding? A proficient developer, or a we going to repeat the current pattern of forcing a teacher of specialty X to teach specialty Y for which he/she is completely unqualified?
Re:Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:4, Informative)
What's is going to help the kid in his future academic career is reading, math, writing, music and ball sports.
Yes, sports. Sports are a great way for a kid to learn social skills. And playing ball at an early age will help the kid develop "ball sense" which will help him with any sport he chooses later on. That's something that a developing brain is most apt to learn and something that people who don't have the experience as a chile never seem to pick up. It seems to be a skill that gets hardwired in at a very early age and once that window is closed, one can never get that sense. I know , I've tried. My coaches are always asking me if I played ball sports as a child because I don't have that "ball sense". and no matter how many hours playing, I just can't get it. (I spent many hours as a child in front of the Apple ][ programming BASIC)
For what it's worth, I spent quite a lot of time on ball sports at school when I grew up, and in retrospect, it was wasted time. It mainly served to build and maintain a class pecking order.
The time I spent hacking on hobby computers, on the other hand, is why I still have a job I like which pays enough to live on. Ball play? It hasn't landed me any jobs, nor made it easier to handle real life. Imagine if all the money spent on sports facilities and coaches had gone to better libraries, labs and teachers...
Re:Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:4, Informative)
I worked as teaching assistant for the computer science at a college and I have to say that, for most people, programming is *not* something that they will just pick up. I worked the computer lab for the introductory programming course and the majority of the students had to work very hard to learn programming.
The point at which students initially had difficulty varied too. A surprising number had trouble with concept of a for loop. All of those students did make it past that though. What all of the students that had significant trouble with the course had in common, though, was the ability to generalize. They had problems with coming up with simple algorithms to solve simple problems. They could describe how to solve for very specific circumstances. Indeed, it seemed, most of the students could code a solution to a very specialize specific scenario, but, at least initially, not the general case. Many student improved greatly in this regard by the end, but a decent number still had issues (and I am only considering the ones that put forth effort in the course).
Most of the students having issues could somewhat understand logical concepts. They could debug simple implementation issues, and they could usually look at other people's working code and explain what the code was doing. These students lacked the ability to think abstractly and apply logic and their learning to new problems where the steps to solve the problem weren't laid out for them. I believe it is the same issue you see in middle/high school math classes where many students can manipulate equations just fine but have problems with solving story problems.
So, I do believe learning (proper) programming at an early age would benefit people. They would get more practice with thinking abstractly and have a venue for seeing practical and essentially immediate results.
Also, I don't thinking learning to program would have to supplant other courses. It could be be used in addition to other topics. For example, children could be give a code that performs math on single digits numbers and then modify to handle numbers with multiple digits. Imagine programming long division and handling remainders. I think implementing the code for this would allow children to understand numbers and math at a deeper level.
Ensuring programming was taught to everyone would have some benefits for employed programmers and to society in general, also. Right now, you see people in forums making comments about the sad state of some particular piece of software and how easy it should to fix an issue or how some problem should be easy to solve with a computer and why don't the programmers just code it up. People would come to realize the difficultly of creating a good program and what trade offs must be made for a program to be made quickly and relatively cheaply and perhaps they would decide for different trade-offs.