With Few US Students Taking CS Classes, Code.org 'Scales Back' Funding For CS Education (acm.org) 162
"In 2012, most CS teacher professional development was paid for by the National Science Foundation or Google." And in the years that followed, 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers received opportunities to learn how to teach computer science without paying any fees -- thanks to tech-bankrolled Code.org.
But is anyone taking the classes? Slashdot reader theodp quotes a Communications of the ACM post by University of Michigan professor Mark Guzdial: In 2013, Code.org began, and they changed the face of CS education in the United States . It started out as just a video (linked here, seen over 14 million times), and grew into an organization that created and provided curriculum, offered teacher professional development, and worked with states and districts around public policy initiatives. A recent report from Code.org showed that 44 states have enacted public policies to promote computing education in the five years from 2013 to 2018, and much of that happened through Code.org's influence....
Now, Code.org has announced that they are starting to scale back their funding, which begins a multi-year transition to shift the burden of paying for teacher professional development to the local regions.... The only question is whether it's too soon. Will local regions step up and demonstrate that they value computer science by paying for it...? I'd guess that many states have between 40% and 70% of their high schools now offering computer science. However, even though many schools offer computer science, there are still few students taking computer science.
Indiana reported that only 0.4% of Indiana high school students had enrolled in their most popular course. Meanwhile in one region in Texas, 54 of 159 high schools offer computer science, yet only 2.3% of their students have ever taken a computer science class. But of course, there's another issue.
"If Code.org (or NSF or Google) are paying for all the development of CS teachers, then the districts don't get to say, 'In our community we care about this and we care less about that.' The U.S. education system is organized around the local regions calling the shots, setting the priorities, and deciding what they want teachers to teach."
But is anyone taking the classes? Slashdot reader theodp quotes a Communications of the ACM post by University of Michigan professor Mark Guzdial: In 2013, Code.org began, and they changed the face of CS education in the United States . It started out as just a video (linked here, seen over 14 million times), and grew into an organization that created and provided curriculum, offered teacher professional development, and worked with states and districts around public policy initiatives. A recent report from Code.org showed that 44 states have enacted public policies to promote computing education in the five years from 2013 to 2018, and much of that happened through Code.org's influence....
Now, Code.org has announced that they are starting to scale back their funding, which begins a multi-year transition to shift the burden of paying for teacher professional development to the local regions.... The only question is whether it's too soon. Will local regions step up and demonstrate that they value computer science by paying for it...? I'd guess that many states have between 40% and 70% of their high schools now offering computer science. However, even though many schools offer computer science, there are still few students taking computer science.
Indiana reported that only 0.4% of Indiana high school students had enrolled in their most popular course. Meanwhile in one region in Texas, 54 of 159 high schools offer computer science, yet only 2.3% of their students have ever taken a computer science class. But of course, there's another issue.
"If Code.org (or NSF or Google) are paying for all the development of CS teachers, then the districts don't get to say, 'In our community we care about this and we care less about that.' The U.S. education system is organized around the local regions calling the shots, setting the priorities, and deciding what they want teachers to teach."
Who in their right mind would enter CS (Score:5, Insightful)
Momma's don't let your babies grow up to be CS Majors, let'em be Doctor's and such.
Anybody in their right mind (Score:2, Insightful)
Anybody in their right degree. (Score:3)
Promoting of CS as a career choice will lead to both resentment by those already established*, as well as too many pursuing too few, lowering wages, and standards. Formal education leads to a well rounded student, and employee.
*Look at the humor surrounding certification.
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These days, educational institutions supposedly still offering these 'well rounded' environments are too busy with political indoctrination to care much for disciplines that rely on facts, logic, and reason.
Re: Anybody in their right degree. (Score:1)
Bullshit... I recently returned to school at 35yrs of age and I have yet to see this "indoctrination" everyone keeps claiming is rampant in our colleges and universities. My professors have been largely neutral and they seem to want the students to come to their own conclusions instead of forcing their ideology down their throats.
However, I have noticed that kids bring their parents' ideological views to school and they often have trouble dealing with different points of view. It's pretty funny being tol
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Your anecdote doesn't count as data.
Re:Anybody in their right mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody in their right country. (Score:3)
If the only needed thing was a warm body then yes. However in telecommuting one's doing more than that. They're bringing their environment as well. And that's not so mobile (hence the ability to tell India from America).
Re: Anybody in their right country. (Score:1)
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Neither do you. Care to take a wack at it, in between snipping breaks?
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Someone in India brings the culture of India to a job. If a job's requirements are written according to the customs of the culture of America, someone raised in the culture of India will probably get it wrong.
Re:Anybody in their right mind (Score:4, Interesting)
Good enough is _always_ good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
But no, they don't charge just as much. You're forgetting about training. US colleges are crazy expensive [fivethirtyeight.com]. You're also forgetting that US workers put in 50-60 hour work weeks while the guys overseas are doing 80. And we used to do 30-40 until we were forced to work harder to compete. Sure, they burn out, but there's literally a billion of them.
I don't really care that my oil filter's only good for 6000 miles when it's $20 bucks. That's because It's cheap, disposable, and good enough..
This is like War Games. The only winning move it not to play.
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You're also forgetting that US workers put in 50-60 hour work weeks while the guys overseas are doing 80. And we used to do 30-40 until we were forced to work harder to compete. Sure, they burn out, but there's literally a billion of them.
My experience is the US workers do 50-60 hour work weeks while the overseas guys work less hours and at a slower pace. I currently have a team in Poland, they actually have laws limiting work hours:
https://www.careersinpoland.co... [careersinpoland.com]
You misunderstood me (Score:2)
And when someone undercuts you it's with "good enough". That's how being undercut works. It's why we all use Microsoft Office instead of Word Perfect even though WP was hand coded in assembly and faster and more stable and didn't eat your documents for breakfast. Good enough was good enough.
Poor substitute (Score:1)
Except that working remotely is nothing like being in the same office with your coworkers.
The company I work for has software engineering offices on either coast of USA, Ireland (where I work), and India. For one's the there's the time zone woes - we only get at most a few working hours in common with any other office, and there's no hours in common between all offices. Teleconferencing is not pleasant. Phones and video connections are still far from perfect, so it's much easier to make yourself understood
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I've worked on several dev projects with people in several timezones. While it can be done, the parent is right, it's much harder. When things go wrong, the blame is almost always put on people who are somewhere else. You don't have the watercooler conversations, so remote workers miss out on a lot. Quite honestly, there's little that can compete with a team all collocated in a lab.
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The Indians and Chinese aren't stupid, the managers that expect offshore consulting companies to deliver novel software projects with minimally trained people are stupid. The offshore workers are doing their best to have a life.
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pay should never be the main criteria for a life long career choice. quite apart making decision, based on short term relative differences in pay of different careers, while ignoring possible long term changes in relative pay as markets change, one should do something one is good at, and can enjoy, and give meaning and satisfaction to life. pay does help with some of that, but it should be a secondary consideration.
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?!
why do you jump to conclusion that a job one is good at, and can enjoy, and give meaning and satisfaction to life, pays minimum wage?
not very good with logic are you? at any rate we know cs is not for you!
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why assume a minimum wage job that is so low in demand, easily fulfilled by anyone, requiring no special skills, satisfying no special need, and having no other characteristic which gives job holder fulfillment, be the choice of anyone looking for a life long career that gives meaning and satisfaction to life? too great a logical jump.
there maybe a minimum wage job that gives fulfillment to some, but those people would be a small percentage, and probably in such cases, specific individual context in which
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To be fair sittingnut did say that "pay .. should be a secondary consideration", not that pay should not matter at all. Still, the notion that one should prefer a minimum wage job (over a higher paying one) because the job fulfills a more important need than monetary pay is still a valid conclusion from their argument.
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That's like saying looks aren't an important parameter in choosing a spouse. We all have minimum standards.
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Ok but now you're saying stuff that has nothing to do with what you originally said. The question isn't whether minimum wage jobs and satisfying or not satisfying but whether you would do your current job for minimum wage. This logic seems to follow, given that you don't care what a job pays you.
you obviously didn't read or understand the full thread. "satisfaction", fulfillment, etc being the primary criteria in which to choose a career was my original (and consistent) point. jumping from that to question about minimum wage job, is too great a logical jump as i pointed out in my last comment.
two subjects seem to have (as you say) "nothing to do with" each other; i would say they are connected by that unwarranted logical jump by ac.
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I think all those starving artists would disagree. Being paid for your work is good, even if your passion is elsewhere.
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> the amount of formal education required is still close to nil.
That's the point. Why would you waste your degree on something so simple a billion guys in Asia can learn in 3 months? Why not major in something actually valuable and then do a coding bootcamp? Programming is utterly simple.
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I see educated parents sending their kids to auto mechanics training at $10,000 instead of coding boot camp. What is the sense of this?
I have at least four guesses.
Hiring (Score:2)
My company just hired a bunch of CS graduates right out of college. We also let go of a few project managers (who worked in a defunct product group) who got new jobs within a month.
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You must live in California. In other places like Texas, the market for CS majors is so tight they are getting 2-3 job offers at a time, having to choose which one to take.
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I've been a developer for almost 40 years and this is a great time to be a software developer. Wages for strong developers relative to other professionals are the highest they have ever been. College interns in Seattle are getting above $5K/month with housing included. We can't find them fast enough. Male, female, old, young, green, purple, they are thin on the ground.
Teach parenting instead (Score:2)
By the time they are teens kids should be able to learn CS without a meat puppet hovering over them in a class, one somewhere far away behind a computer to help them occasionally should be enough together with good parents to keep them motivated.
Sure it's a noble goal to try to rescue kids from bad parents, but it's an uphill battle ... attack the problem at it's source first and foremost, parenting classes in high school rather than CS.
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I've been a mentor in a high school coding class. I'll have to disagree, I mean parenting is very important but so is human interaction. The amount of help needed, the interest level and the maturity level vary a lot. Those kids have questions and its best if you are right there to help.
At the same time, we have to be honest, programming is not for everyone. Just like accounting isn't for everyone. Its good to know something about coding and something about accounting but we don't all need to be experts
Teach Steam instead (Score:3)
Maybe. It is interesting how programming games are a popular genre on Steam. No classes required there, and it gives one an idea in a fun way.
Re:Teach parenting instead (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, good programmers don't need to be recruited or sold on programming. They'll do it with or without a class at their school, because it's who they are. Begging randos to become coders will only get you a bunch of shit coders.
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Fine, and one can say that about any field. Teachers? The good ones are the ones with a passion for teaching. Scientists? The best ones are those with a passion for learning. You don't need to recruit those because they will naturally find their field.
But what if you need 100 programmers/teachers/scientists, and you only have 10 who are passionate about it? Your task (as a society) is to fill the remaining 90 positions with people who can do the work. Which requires attracting people whose first inst
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It's not about elitism. It's about talent and interest, which often go hand in hand. If anything, pro athetics are even more exclusive and discriminating than most tech fields. Just like no one wants players joining soccer teams who don't commit to practice, tech people don't want lamers filling their workplaces with cruft (and nowadays, destructive politics) and very little productive talent. There's nothing elitist about this because such people detract from the process.
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Any parent to tried to teach a child to "code" should have their kids taken away. Coding is a more-or-less trivial vocational skill that you can learn in a week if you know other things first - like basic problem-solving skills.
Kids need to be kids, play games, get in competition/conflicts/fights (that are not moderated by adults) and learn basic language, mathematics, history, and civics Not learn a niche manual skill.
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lol.. bubble sorts ARE remedial logic.
Why should they? (Score:3)
Kids don't need CS training to use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, etc.
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No danger of too much maths (Score:2)
In my kids school. They work hard to ensure only the minimum is taught.
It seemed to me that programming became less fun (Score:2)
The big question is, how many of those kids should be learning programming.
When I started out in the late 70s, you were busy coding solutions to problems, and writing real code. Later it became more about memorizing big function/class libraries, which got old pretty fast.
I asked a younger guy who is in the business about it recently, and he said nowadays what you learn are 'frameworks', whatever that is.
Even back in the 70s, when I was taking classes, the beginning classes were big for Comp Sci majors, but
Re: It seemed to me that programming became less f (Score:1)
And I wonder how good all those 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers actually are at teaching programming.
They're as good at teaching programming as they are at programming.
It seemed to me that frameworks became less fun (Score:2)
"I asked a younger guy who is in the business about it recently, and he said nowadays what you learn are 'frameworks', whatever that is."
*raised eyebrow* Frameworks are an old idea. "Whatever that is" shouldn't be a question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I resisted .NET for a long time on personal projects. Last month I started something ambitious, in C#, and I can crank out piles of functionality. Who needs to memorize when you have Google and stack overflow? And of course you can put ASM in a .dll and P/Invoke if you need the speed, but it's rare.
Coding slowly is not fun. Reusing tested code to save time is fun.
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At the time I more or less retired, that kind of support was in its infancy. I'm glad to hear that things have gotten better in some respects.
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That's why you need to expose kids to CS, and a wide variety of other subjects. How else are they going to know if they like it?
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Yes, we do. I did a CS course at a decent university. We were taught ARM assembly, systems programming in C, algorithms, a bunch of networking modules of varying depth and scope, low level processor architecture (culminated in an assignment to make a CPU simple in VHDL, mine worked just barely). There were also modules that looked at OS functionality and scheduling, and yes we were taught about semaphores and mutexes and preemption. There was also a module on computer architecture where we explored cache co
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I wonder if the people being taught "programming" today know how to make a linked list. Do they know how to use semaphores, or even what semaphores are? Have they ever seen what their written program code looks like when translated by a compiler to machine code?
Speaking for the people I work with the answers are yes, yes, and maybe. Modern processors are too advanced for anyone to effectively hand-write assembly code.
I've written embedded C code for microprocessors, and now I'm writing server-side code for one of the big five. What I'm doing now is much harder. First, there's just so much to know. When I was writing C code, there was just the application and OS services. Building a modern massively scaled internet application is vastly more complicated.
Re: It seemed to me that programming became less (Score:2)
But the bike is Agile(tm)!
Just like climate change... (Score:1)
codecombat (Score:1)
Kids that will be natural programmers won't even need a teacher to play
If SJWs want more girls in programming, they should fork https://github.com/codecombat/... [github.com] and make a version that is more appealing to young girls.
Teaching CS: The Least of our concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, from observing the way a large minority of citizens are behaving (and believing) in the United States, learning to program computers is a relatively minuscule concern.
Rather, teaching this mass of ignorant anti-rational people how to think clearly, from facts, is critically important.
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Are we talking about whites who don't want to be a minority in their own country? Because if so, I'm here to tell you that THEY'RE the rational ones.
Here's a fact: minorities get treated like shit, whatever the circumstances. Especially if whites aren't in the majority.
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Are we talking about whites who don't want to be a minority in their own country?
By "their own country", do you mean the country they invaded a couple of centuries ago?
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You do realize that "native-Americans" immigrated here as well, don't you?
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Maybe, we can actually do more than one thing at a time. In fact, maybe teaching CS will help people think logically.
Because it's hard! (Score:1)
Most kids are more interested in what kind of social shennanigans and petty politics they can get up to rather than working hard at something. Same as most adults. Most people could care less about being productive and useful in life, they just want to see how much they can grab through petty back-stabbing and bullshit games. Hence the popularity of worthless "Humanities" degrees. The only value of "Humanities Degree" is you you repeatedly crumble and uncrumble the piece of paper it is written on until the
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I post under my real name you worthless, cowardly asshole. I've worked since I was 14 years old. I've never had anyone pay my debts. I've supported more people than you ever will. When I'm involved with something, I get shit done. Go kill yourself you worthless, cowardly, anonymous fuck-tard!
This isn't failure (Score:5, Insightful)
It's course correction. The 'EVERYONE MUST CODE!' initiatives were ludicrous to begin with. It was said a great deal at the time: not everyone wants to learn to code or has a natural interest in it, and no amount of bullying from tech companies is going to change that. It's as it should be, and this is what it looks like when only those with a real interest take a subject. Make it a math elective and let those who want to pursue it pursue it.
It's worth noting as well that more and more of our technology resembles appliance, and using that metaphor, very few people want to learn to fix other appliances like washing machines or care how they work (do you?). Silicon Valley got pretty full of itself there for awhile, so much of what has been proposed by them has been a riduculous, overly-hyped canard. What we are seeing now was pretty much inevitable, and it means things have re-stabilized from the ebb and flow and nothing more.
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Excellent points and analysis.
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I'm not sure I disagree entirely, but I have a bright high schooler in my family, well ahead of grade on math / calculus, certainly not struggling academically and when he got the chance to do the coding class he did not go for it.
I suspect he considerered it to be combination of boring or irrelevant, or the pacing was wrong or the homework. In any case, I think it would have been better for him if every class had included some aspect of coding and the coding class had been a purer CS (data structures, oop,
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I have a bright high schooler in my family... when he got the chance to do the coding class he did not go for it.
I suspect he considerered it to be combination of boring or irrelevant, or the pacing was wrong or the homework.
He wouldn't know that unless he already tried taking the class. It's the advertising, or the lack thereof, that put him off.
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Yeah just like the "everybody must algebra" movement was ludicrous.
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Or that we offer loads of scholarships for athletics, or simply good grades, but not for doing degrees that American businesses n
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Everyone should learn to code but that doesn't mean making it a career. It is a basic skill alongside reading and math. What they are teaching kids with drag and drop code and highly abstracted oop coding isn't really what they need though. Everyone should learn non-oop coding so they learn solid fundamental structured logic. With oop there is always a magic box beneath you.
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There is no "EVERYONE MUST CODE". What everyone must do is get exposure to code, just like you got exposure to a wide variety of topics in school. Unless you're exposed to it, you won't appreciate, or know if it's something you're interested in, or possibly good at doing.
What were these classes allowed to replace (Score:2)
Without the basics (Score:2)
Our public schools struggle to teach reading, writing and arthritic. After High School many students do not function at grade level and can not pass entry level college classes. How would they have the skill set to be a programmer or have a career in IT. Form that matter any STEM field.
Just my 2 cents
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If only they taught the meaning of hyperbole. In 2017, the graduation rate across the US was 84%. The lowest state had 68%
I'm fully expecting a rebuttal about how kids are just pushed through, or that state averages don't show the low local numbers (true, but those are the exception). Yes, school systems should be held accountable for the kids they're graduating, but that's become a political football that neither side holds high moral ground on.
Deep dive of software devel issues (Score:1)
CS knowledge should be the point (Score:4, Insightful)
I think all students should learn to code, just like all students should learn to do algebra, or find the intersection of two linear equations, or write an essay.
But the end goal is not to make everyone programmers. The end goal is to make people well rounded, aware of how things work, because in most jobs, you benefit from understanding how computers work. And if you can code at all, you understand how they work in a fundamental way.
Can't Teach The Retarded (Score:1)
thats because this is being done wrong (Score:2)
In particular, if student takes a particular coding class, and passes it, then pay a % of for the students tuition.
Assume that this was an intro CS class. If they get an A, pay 66%. B? pay 50%. c? Pay 33%.
Once they get up higher, say Algorithms/Data Structures, pay 100% on A, 75% on B, and 50% on C.
Finally, once into upper-end classes that can help a company directly, then pay 100/90/60 on A/B/C.
The point being that if S
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Just like with learning a new language, kids need exposure to CS at an early age. That doesn't mean they need a career in it, but exposure to give them a taste and see if they have interest and ability.
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This is all paranoid conspiracy bullshit. There was never any evidence for Eric Raymond's claims. Now you're just layering perverse fantasy on top of evidence free claims.