Programming Education Making A Comeback In Primary Schools 138
New submitter kyrsjo (2420192) writes "The Economist has an article on how information technology — the real stuff, not just button-pushing — is making its way back to schools across the world. As the article argues: 'Digital technology is now so ubiquitous that many think a rounded education requires a grounding in this subject just as much as in biology, chemistry or physics.' In today's society, teaching computer science in schools is absolutely necessary, and that means getting a real understanding of computers and how they work. That requires working with algorithms and programming, not just learning which buttons to push in the program that the school happened to use."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just don't make programming classes mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
My point is that those subjects, which 99% of people never use again in their adult life, are mandatory. And yet computers, which most of us use daily since there's now microcontrollers everywhere, are still magical boxes for most people.
If more people understood basic things like binary, base 2 vs base 10, basic CPU processing, memory, bandwidth, trojans vs viruses, we would have a lot less problems with stupid things like "Western Digital sold me a smaller hard drive than advertised" or "I'm going to upload this 30 megabytes, 12 megapixel photo to use as my avatar picture for that forum" or the ever-popular "I entered my account password so I could watch porn".
Teaching real-world examples would be good, such as "Netflix stopped working, where is the problem coming from? My playback device? My wi-fi router? My ISP modem? My ISP? Netflix?"
The answer to the last problem is, of course, "your iTunes account didn't have enough funds to renew your Netflix subscription".
Re: Primary school might be too late (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget tablets... give them LEGO Mindstorms and Raspberry Pis!