CollegeBoard: Analyses of CS Study Benefits Shouldn't Be Interpreted As Causal 131
theodp writes: Code.org, backed by some of tech's wealthiest individuals and their companies, is this close to getting computer science declared a 'core subject' in K-12 public schools. So, when the non-profit recently asked CollegeBoard for more evidence that learning computer science is linked to improved learning in other subjects, it must have been disheartened by the study results. "The purpose of this brief note," wrote the CollegeBoard, "is to document some exploratory analyses linking participation in AP Computer Science to subsequent performance in SAT Mathematics and AP Calculus and Statistics. None of these analyses should be interpreted as causal. Although there appears to be a relationship between AP CS participation and subsequent outcomes, it is highly likely that this is the result of one or more omitted and confounding characteristics of students that are not able to be controlled for given this research design."
They should make them all core subjects (Score:4, Insightful)
Learning doesn't happen in a vacuum. Every subject, addressed properly, will have spillover - even if it's just as an expansion of the curriculum to create a feeling of value to a student concerning the learning environment.
But, of course, when they're all considered "Core" subjects, none of them are core subjects - they're just curriculum. Pixar said it best - when everybody is special, nobody is special. And then we're back to where we started.
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rides the ubiquitous human belief that more is better!
More things are made offensive. More things become a human right. Hell, before you know it, exceptional will be normal and offensive, simultaneously.
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Too much is always better than not enough.
The only exceptions are where 'not enough' throws 'div by 0'.
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What's so important about being special?
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After being misdiagnosed as mentally retarded, I was in Special Ed classes for eight years. I can reassure you that there's nothing special about being treated like an idiot.
They put me in Special Ed because they thought I was slow, but I stayed in Special Ed for the ladies [youtube.com].
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On the other hand, while any learning is beneficial, some subjects are more so and some less. If you focus on those that are less useful, you are getting a negative effect as there is no time left for the more useful ones. It is difficult to decide what is most useful, admittedly.
I do not think that CompSci is a core subject. It is really important for society, true, but so are EE, medicine, city-planning, etc. Core subjects should be those that a majority will need often in their personal and professional
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Why we are teaching trigonometry to everybody? I never understood that. Seems like a complete waste of time. Have aptitude tests and then do advanced math only for those that actually can understand it and benefit from it.
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Trig is pretty basic math. Intermediate math starts after calculus.
There is a reason that Engineering school is different from law or medical. They have found testing predicts success. Engineering school has had much less luck with testing. Hence they let anybody interested in and flunk out 75% freshman year.
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Depends on who your target audience is. For students of mathematics, you are right. For average people, you are not. There, everything after basic algebra is "advanced".
I was obviously not talking about engineering school either.
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My point is that it is hard to test for 'math potential'. In no small part because high school teachers (and before) have so little of it.
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The problem with core subjects is that is is expected that everybody take them and must get a passing grade. English and math are core subjects because from that stems almost all general education. The problem with CS is, it requires a very specific skill set that not every body has, as a result you would cut out a large amount of people, just because some body deemed a "must have skill". Nobody would expect business administration to be core subject in school?
Really? (Score:2)
I would not expect computers and/or computer science to improve the performance of students in SAT Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics.
We use computers so we dont have to remember all that crap. The computer does the math.
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
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In middle school (in the 70s) I told my teachers that I didn't need to learn to spell because computers would check my spelling for me.
They said I was full of shit, they were wrong.
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It improves written language and reading comprehension skills, those languages just aren't any of the same ones spoken by the rest of humanity.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
The problem is, and I think CollegeBoard is saying this, that anyone who has the ability to take AP CS and then take the test should already have significantly developed reading, comprehension, and logical thinking skills. From my experience (I did go to a school with a magnet program but AP classes were open to all students) most students who took an AP class took several; it was very rare to have someone take just one class. So it was a bad idea to have CollegeBoard do a study anyway because there is no way to isolate any potential benefit with AP CS from the student's general ability/interest. Unless Code.org was counting on this so that they could obfuscate the results to show whatever they wanted (a distinct possibility).
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However, a LOT of them had very poor spelling, reading and grammar skills.
This is why they're going to a community college and not a university. Community colleges do a better job at remedial education for both high school graduates and dropouts. Most universities avoid remedial education like the plague.
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Most universities have more than 50% of their freshman taking some sort of remedial coursework.
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As someone who returned to a community college in 2009, I was surrounded by kids who had the whole litany of AP classes. Many of them were bragging about their 5.0 GPA in HS. However, a LOT of them had very poor spelling, reading and grammar skills.
These things do not add up. First of all, considering only AP classes get the added 1 weight it is impossible for anyone to get a 5.0. I went to school with several people who aced the math portion of the SAT, one person who taught himself Chinese, and many other very smart individuals: none of them ever got a perfect score in every AP class nor did any of them go to community college-but plenty went to Ivy League schools, top research/engineering schools, we even had one guy go to Juilliard for violin (a
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+1 for honors, +2 for AP is common.
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I would not expect computers and/or computer science to improve the performance of students in SAT Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics.
We use computers so we dont have to remember all that crap. The computer does the math.
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
Computing teaches any problem domain that you are asked to code solutions for.
The problem with initiatives like code.org is that they generally try to engage kids by making things move on the screen. Most of that means doing very basic arithmetic in an esoteric firmat surrounded by Byzantine library calls.
If you want kids to do better in statistics, you shouldn't start with the paradigm of interactive entertainment, but with the far less abstract view of a computer as something that computes stuff. Kids mi
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I would not expect computers and/or computer science to improve the performance of students in SAT Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics.
We use computers so we dont have to remember all that crap. The computer does the math.
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
Computing teaches any problem domain that you are asked to code solutions for.
The problem with initiatives like code.org is that they generally try to engage kids by making things move on the screen. Most of that means doing very basic arithmetic in an esoteric firmat surrounded by Byzantine library calls.
If you want kids to do better in statistics, you shouldn't start with the paradigm of interactive entertainment, but with the far less abstract view of a computer as something that computes stuff. Kids might not like their schoolwork, but it's certainly relevant to them. Part of the problem teaching complex maths is that the mechanics of carrying out the underlying computations diverts attention from the "big picture" view. Procedural computing was designed specifically to address the problem of "can't see the wood for the trees" by separating the general algorithm from the specifics of implementation.
I think they are conflating programming and computer science. I think theres a lot of this confusion surrounding the discussion of this article, and indeed in teaching computer science at this level.
Computer science is only tangentially related to programming.
Most of computer science involves things like logic and discrete maths; state machines, turing machines, computation theory, set theory, algebra of functions, big-O notation and efficiency of algorithms. I majored in computer science and did very littl
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Not Tested by SAT (Score:2)
I would not expect computers and/or computer science to improve the performance of students in SAT Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics.
We use computers so we dont have to remember all that crap. The computer does the math.
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
Logical thinking in particular is the most likely area for improvement. It would also give good foundation skills for editing, but not good enough on their own.
You might see an improvement on LSAT scores. The SAT just doesn't test that stuff well.
Also, keep in mind that intro Comp Sci on its own is very hit-and-miss in college, and there's no reason it wouldn't be in high school.
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The field of computer science is about *making* the software that does all the math (which involves knowing how math works), not simply *using* the software (which involves a computer doing all the math for you).
Human (Score:2, Interesting)
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Have you read your own sig?
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I not only read it, I wrote it, along with new economic theory and large amounts of planning, market analysis, and risk considerations and management strategies.
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I've read your rants. They are the most vacuous thing I've read in a long time. Shows a complete lack of understanding of economics and history.
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I only get that line from people who hold up the Holy Writ of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. Too bad all modern economics is based on an equivocation fallacy in which the term "value" means several different things, yet is interchanged to justify things even when the definition of value is unfixed between two suggestions.
Real economics--economics that surpasses all currently published treatises--dispenses with the term "value", applying only "valuation" in market economics to indicate what the market or a par
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professional economists don't understand real economics?
Somebody just published (in 2010) a dissertation explaining capitalism, how markets work, and how this affects economic policy creation. Dissertations add new knowledge to the field.
I encourage you to reflect on why economists frequently publish dissertations citing all of their peers's contributions as things they've identified as wrong.
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This is the most vacuous thing I have read today.
Nice word man .. you know, there is a simpler way of saying that .
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The argument is that software is largely making things unique, and that functionality is not important.
Information systems are a hard science of process improvement. You are either solving off-the-shelf technical problems (this is why we have libraries), combining off-the-shelf technical solutions into business processes which meet requirements, or developing new solutions to technical problems (like process scheduling or video compression). The vast majority of computer programming, network engineerin
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I do not know what you do in CS, but I do pretty demanding engineering and some actual applied science. Your comment illustrates what is wrong with most "coders" though.
Core subjetc my a$$.... (Score:3)
In this day and age, everybody should have a basic understand of how computers work and how to use them. Know what a file is, network etc. Same with social media.
But I get the feeling what theses clowns are aiming to do is get people to learn basic coding in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries......Make it so that anybody with a high school diploma can apply for entry-level coding jobs.
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That's one theory (and the more realistic one).
Another is that coding won't be the primary job of most of the college graduates in the future, but that it will be a necessary subset of skills required to do a job (not realistic until it's sold that way).
We're probably already at the place where anyone with an Sparkfun account feels like they're an expert, and coding is something anyone can and should pick up.
Anecdote incoming, which I fully acknowledge is not the singular of "data": I was having an eye-roll
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Sorry, what I meant was:
Point being that the idea of "coding" and "putting your hands on the metal" is so much more accessible to the normal person nowadays that anyone who has access to something that looks a little more technical than a toaster gets the idea that they are within reach of a job as a coding ninja.
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in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries
Why is it people can understand this effect, but can't understand government-funded or government-backed (loans) college initiatives do this on a grand scale, deflating the value, power, and, ultimately, salaries of the individual? Even when I explain the whole of the mechanism fully in ways people can understand, they eventually go, "Well, yeah, that makes sense; but it's still empowering to be able to get an education!" when they just agreed it's the best and most effective way to strip employee power a
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Just because someone attends 4 years of college, doesn't mean they learn anything.
The practical effect is making liberal arts degrees even more worthless. It won't change a thing for programs with rigor. It isn't money that keeps 95% of students out of hard science/engineering, it is lack of intelligence and self discipline.
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It's not that. The standard argument is SELF-ACCESSIBLE college gives people the ability to get jobs by allowing them to, on their own, by their own assessment, using their own resources (time at least; money, if doing student loans instead of government-paid college), obtain a marketable job skill.
In a market where students can reasonably self-propel (that is, where anyone not sufficiently rich can send themselves to college), the absolute best course of action for the individual is to go to college and
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There is no best course of action for everybody. Some people aren't cut out for school and should get on with getting a skill.
Have you ever worked with a net negative worker? Someone who goes around creating 1.5 hours of cleanup for every hour they actually work?
Hiring the 'Chinese army' is a terrible way to run a project.
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There is no best course of action for everybody. Some people aren't cut out for school and should get on with getting a skill.
You're assessing this in the wrong way.
Every single potential student is better off WITH A DEGREE than WITHOUT A DEGREE. Creating a market where EVERYONE CAN AND IS EXPECTED TO GET A DEGREE means should 10x as many people be in a position to get a degree as available jobs will support, the best decision for every single one of them is to get a degree.
If only as many students went for degrees as available jobs, you'd get the same amount of employment, but higher salaries, more worker power, and, of cours
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Just because someone attends 4 years of college, doesn't mean they learn anything.
I somewhat agree, and I agree with you that scholarships and loans can help someone who has talent but no money. The problem is early access to resources that would develop talented individuals. In other words, if you're smart but stuck in a crappy school, live in a bad neighborhood and have a bad home life, it's going to be significantly harder to get yourself to the point where you would even think about pushing yourself in
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I bet p-chem was joy for your non-math self.
Anyhow, linguistics majors are already ahead of 80% of the student population. Sure they were studying a useless subject, but they were studying.
Compare to the Business/Psych/Sociology/Communications/* studies majors, who are there to party. They would have been much better served to party while working until they had grown up enough to get something out of college. By my estimation they make up 80% of graduating college students. More of incoming freshman. F
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But I get the feeling what theses clowns are aiming to do is get people to learn basic coding in order to flood the market with code monkeys that know how to write an if-then-else statement in order to deflate CS salaries......Make it so that anybody with a high school diploma can apply for entry-level coding jobs.
Right, because what Microsoft and Facebook are looking for is entry-level coders for jobs that don't require much more than an if-then-else statement. I suppose it's remotely possible that flooding the entry-level market could reduce pressure on the higher end, but I highly doubt that the effect would be noticeable. The skills gap is just too large and the productivity difference between the top and bottom ends too large.
What's more likely is that they realize that good programmers are as much born as mad
Why children should NOT be taught to code (Score:5, Insightful)
I've written about this at some length in my book Beyond Technology. The argument depends upon assumptions about learning transfer -- the idea that learning in one context will automatically transfer across to others. This is to conceive of the brain as a kind of muscle: a good workout in the coding gym will have payoffs when we need our logical thinking skills to solve problems elsewhere. Similar claims are often made for learning the game of chess, or Latin. Yet there is no convincing evidence that learning computer programming enables children to develop more general problem-solving skills, let alone that it will 'teach you how to think', as its advocates claim.
While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
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While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
Indeed. Additionally, we need to consider that the performance of a self-selecting group of students taking a course voluntarily may NOT necessarily reflect a general trend that would be applicable to ALL students when a course is required.
In other words, even IF programming does help develop logical thinking in students who are interested in it, it does not necessarily follow that these performance gains would happen with all students.
We need only look at the history of geometric proofs in high-school
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While I have to say I really loved the geometric proofs (we had them here when I went to school), I am not sure there was a single other pupil that did more than learning them by heart or ignoring them. They are excellent for the few that understand the ideas behind them, but a complete waste and an unnecessary burden for the others.
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I am with you here: You can improve logical thinking with coding (and with many other activities), but you need to have significant ability in the first place for that to work. Most programmers do not use logic to create their code, they use imitation. Consequentially, they do not have much of a clue what their code actually does besides the one main obvious function. That is why so much code is so unreliable and so insecure. That is also why most people will not benefit from learning basic coding skills an
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That is also why most people will not benefit from learning basic coding skills and will never advance beyond those basic skills. Coding is hardcore engineering and doing it well requires significant talent in addition to training and experience. Without that talent, your chances of ever becoming good at it are non-existent.
As an adjunct at a couple of colleges, in my mind the true value in having courses like this being taught in grades 9-12 would be to steer some students away from taking programming courses in college when they're not sure what they want to study. I'm not trying to be elitist either. I have taught many students who really weren't very interested in learning how to program, but were wedged into comp-sci because "that's where all the jobs are". I'd rather have them avoid this pitfall rather than when they're
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Now _that_ is the first sensible argument for trying to teach coding to everybody that I have heard. I am all for that. But, of course, it should not be a full-blown core subject for this, just a sort-of mandatory side-course.
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That's the argument for teaching the first course in COBOL. Strictly as a weed out.
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What, you want to discourage anybody with real talent to go into coding or CompSci? While I admire your ingenuity, I do not quite understand what your end-game here is. Accelerated collapse of industrial society?
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If you don't love programming COBOL will drive you out. But it's no worse than the project planning of the average PHB or the average codebase in service.
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And what about those that do not love coding yet, because they do not know it yet? Which these days will be the majority of the talented?
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These days people have far less excuse for not learning a couple of programming languages in middle school then going from there. I had to wash dishes for a summer to pay for my first 'microcomputer'. These days you get better ones in cereal boxes.
I've never met a 'talented programmer' born after 1960 who learned to code in school. Not one.
They did pay attention in school and learn to code to standards, but already knew how to code. Coding just comes natural to some of us.
'What programming languages
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Hmm. Difficult question. I learned PASCAL in school (and knew BASIC and some assembler before), but it was taught by an enthusiast teacher and we were all there in our spare time, no grades or anything. And I self-learned C from a book not long after, because PASCAL back then was limited to 64k data and I needed more.
Still, I do not think COBOL is a good idea. A combination of PYTHON and C may serve the same goal (just require real understanding for most of what is taught), without putting off the ones with
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People that already know how to code test out of COBOL. The syntax is butt simple and being an introductory course the coding is also simple.
It's directed at the students that use salary surveys to pick majors. We are doing them a favor by showing them the worst CS environment early.
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With that student group as target, I agree to your reasoning.
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While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
If it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, you're holding it wrong.
The imperative-procedural paradigm that virtually all mainstream programming is based on hides logic behind a slavish step-by-step drudge. You can't see the program (woods) for the code (trees). This is why you have to have a particularly strong grasp of logical thought before you go into computing -- it's a huge strain keeping the bigger picture in mind while fighting over the minutiae.
Last year I switched a project
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I would offer some kind of intro to programming/C/Python/Pearl as an elective and maybe only in a magnet school.
All students need exposure to a good introduction to computer course, as computers are everywhere these days. Why should only the so called gifted have access to computers and not everyone else?
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Using computers and building and programming computers are two very different beasts.
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And how is that relevant?
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Disappointing (Score:1)
Mathematics before computer programming... (Score:2)
Although I cut my teeth on Commodore 64 BASIC and 6502 assembly language for eight years as a kid, I wasn't a good programmer and took only the required Introduction to Computers course in college. Surprisingly, I got an A in that class and every guidance counselor since that class insisted that I study computers. I took a lot of English lit and mathematics instead.
Through a twist of fate, I got a six-month internship in black box software testing and enjoyed the work. Became a video game tester and lead te
AP CS students already have advantages (Score:3)
I'm glad the College Board is showing a little academic objectivity here, considering the fact that they have the potential to make lots of money off AP exams, increased SAT usage if more students are herded into college, etc. There are several things that AP CS students most likely have going for them that explain any causation:
- They're probably at least halfway decent at math and science courses already, or they wouldn't be on the AP track.
- They go to a good high school, as lousy high schools have lower AP course attendance / exam administration levels.
- They probably have semi-involved parents, or at the very least aren't having insurmountable home front problems preventing them from benefiting fully from school.
On top of that, I'm not sure it's a good idea to force every reasonably logic-minded student to be a "coder." I'm not a coder, I work in IT and use my problem solving/troubleshooting skills to fix things. Yes, I write scripts and automation tools, but it's certainly not Internet-facing stuff. Other people with the gift for logic would make good doctors, traditional engineers (civil, chemical, etc.) or dare I say it, lawyers. Even in a severely changed employment world, I don't see millions of people clustered around cafeteria tables in hipster San Francisco office lofts coding up the next Tinder or Uber. In fact, I'm amazed about how much this latest tech boom is like the dotcom boom...people are running around saying "this time it's different," companies are IPOing with valuations based on the modern equivalent of eyeballs, and no one apparently learned anything from the last boom. There was an article on here last week about how CS enrollment has hit its pre-dotcom crash peak again...hang on tight folks!
I think that if we turn out a whole generation of Java coders who know little about actual computer science, which seems to be the majority now, it'll be the equivalent of the Soviet Union or China trying to rapidly industrialize without having the necessary skills in place. In those cases, it worked but there was a significant skill mismatch, famines, etc. The only reason it worked was because it was forced. I doubt every single smart, talented person in the US is going to want to sit cranking out JavaScript, Ruby or PHP code all day for some phone app...it's just not a sustainable market, especially when wages are headed down and offshoring is constantly being used.
Define "CS" (Score:2)
CS should not be a core subject (Score:3)
CS courses in elementary and even in middle school are generally a waste of time. The amount of accretive knowledge to be gained at that early an age isn't going to put any student so far along the learning curve that doing it all again in high school would be so repetitive as to be a waste of time. So just do it at the high school level, when kids are actually at the point of making career choices and the corresponding college selections to follow those choices. And don't make every kid take the CS course, when it's obvious far from every kids will be pursuing a CS-type career.