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Education United States

50 Governors Sign Compact in Response To Tech Executives' Request For More CS-Savvy Kids 82

theodp writes: On Monday, a who's who of the nation's tech leaders -- organized as CEOs for CS by the tech-backed nonprofit Code.org -- issued a public challenge in a letter to 'the Governors of the United States', calling on the Govs to bring more computer science to K-12 students in their states.

On Thursday, as the National Governors Association kicked off their 2022 Summer Meeting, 50 of the nation's Governors -- many of whom are members of the Code.org-advised Govs for CS -- accepted the nation's CEOs' challenge, signing a Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education, which may involve a number of strategies, including "requiring a computer science credit for high school graduation."

News of the Governors' K-12 CS education compact coincidentally came on the same day as the nation's K-12 CS teachers gathered in Chicago to kickoff the Tech Giant and Code.org-sponsored CSTA 2022 Annual Conference.
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50 Governors Sign Compact in Response To Tech Executives' Request For More CS-Savvy Kids

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  • by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @04:37PM (#62703414)

    You want more CS-literate kids? Ask for volunteers to sit in a classroom with a laptop for an hour a day. Give them access to the Internet. Anyone who programs cool shit gets an A, anyone who doesn't gets kicked out of class.

    Literally everything you need is available online for free, including university-grade education. The best programmers I know are ones who didn't go to school and simply have a passion for it.

    • if they little shits can't program cool shit on command burn 'em. A little cigarette sized burn is a small price to pay for good software, right? /s.

      The "problem" is that they want more code monkeys to depress wages. They're not interested in better code, they want more of it. Rich people, the kind who push elected officials for more of a specific kind of employee, just throw a lot of stuff a wall to see what sticks. Quality isn't what matters, quantity is.

      That and gov't subsidies. You don't get ric
    • by lsllll ( 830002 )
      Every kid's dream of "becoming a computer programmer" involves programming games. I've given talks during career days to my local high school kids and every kid's question was "what should I concentrate on", and my answer always was math and physics, especially if you want to be a game programmer. But the reality is that when programmers go into the real world, they're not writing games. Fuck! The last game I wrote was in college, and it was to play Connect 4 over a NetWare LAN. I've been writing admin
      • I started by wanting to write games and text adventures in BASIC, and realized I liked programming and just creating things with a computer. Those kids can start by wanting to program games

      • After all, the only way you can deal with writing boring programs day-in, day-out, is if you actually love programming itself.

        I don't actually love it. It was sort of fun once upon a time. But what keeps me going is the knowledge, gained from experience, that there are far, far worse ways of earning a living.

      • by tsqr ( 808554 )

        But the reality is that when programmers go into the real world, they're not writing games.

        And they're better off for that. Working as a game programmer consists of long hours for peanuts. There are many interesting, high paying software engineering jobs in aerospace, and I dont just mean defense.

      • So? Everyone wants to program games. Not many want to actually work as a game dev once they realized that the market has made game dev long hours for medium wages, while specializing in a variety of other things is normal effort for good wages.

        The wannabe game devs will either stick with it and rock, or give up and have a completely different speciality that they also like.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      including university-grade education. The best programmers I know are ones who didn't go to school

      This is a myth. I know we love our college dropout billionaires, millionaire bedroom coders, and scrappy teen entrepreneurs, but they are far and away the exception.

      See, autodidacts have a lot of problems. The most obvious being that they simply can't know what it is they don't know, so important concepts are often overlooked. Of the subjects they do happen to stumble across, it's also difficult, if not impossible, for them to properly assess their own mastery. They also have a tendency to think that to

      • >>The best programmers I know are ones who didn't go to school

        >This is a myth

        This might surprise you to learn, but the world exists beyond the tip of your nose. And I'm here to tell you that I've met a LOT of programmers. Seriously, a lot. And the best ones I've met have been self-taught, have a passion for it, and do it because they love it.

        The universe of other people's experiences and opinions that they share aren't a myth unless you think the universe consists of you and you alone...which I'm s

        • by narcc ( 412956 )

          Oh, okay. Clearly, uneducated programmers are the best because ... you've met a lot of programmers? You having personally met a lot of programmers, without question, trumps my decades of experience and extensive formal education. You sure put me in my place.

          • by Anonymous Coward

            You're conflating two things here: "Uneducated" programmers and "self-taught" programmers.

            It's quite true that a formal education will throw a set programme of topic at the student, so they can be expected to at least know of the existence of said topics. And you can't quite expect that from self-taught programmers. But they have certainly been educated, by themselves. So they do know something. There's just no syllabus to list the topics, or a list of signatures by certified educators to show they picked

          • >You having personally met a lot of programmers, without question, trumps my decades of experience and extensive formal education

            1. If you've had decades of experience you're likely too old to perceive things, and that's reflected by your attitude in arguments

            2. Just because the best programmers I met didn't go to school doesn't mean that the best programmers you met did or didn't.

      • not sure I agree.

        Of the top notch people I've worked with, they varied from PhD to no university education. One of the latter had self taught to the level that most people doing that work have PhDs.

        I've also met crap programmers with PhDs, first degrees and no degrees.

        Many people in programming don't have CS as a degree, so most of the algorithms and stuff is self taught anyway.

        • by narcc ( 412956 )

          It's true that you don't need a CS degree to be a programmer, and a CS degree shouldn't be all about programming like a lot of CS programs seem to be these days. I don't expect an engineer to be a skilled auto mechanic, and I don't expect an auto mechanic to be a skilled engineer. Neither do I expect a physician to be any good at nursing. I think we'd be much better off with a separate computer programming degree, and putting the CS back in CS.

          I've always said that programming is a skill that anyone can l

          • Professional programmers, however, really should have some formal training.

            But in what? As you correctly point out CS isn't programming, and CS degrees (or the good ones) don't really teach programming as such. At the moment the only things that actually teach programming for its own sake are janky CS degrees and coding bootcamps.

            In programming, there's a ton of learning on the job. When I arrived at my first internship, I had the mechanics of coding down: I understood the syntax and logical flow, I could g

            • by narcc ( 412956 )

              Hmm... that puts me on the spot. I'll put this out there. It's not particularly well thought-out, mostly just what came to mind as I was writing it. This is just a slashdot post after all. Take it for what it's worth.

              A computer programming degree should be a practical degree. There will, necessarily, be some overlap with a proper CS degree. I don't want a clean line between the practical and theoretical, but that's as good as any place to start. We're also limited on time. A typical undergrad degree i

              • Sorry for the slow reply, lots to think about (also insane heatwave here).

                A typical undergrad degree is 120 credit hours, but we don't get to fill all of them. We need to leave room for remediation, electives, and required classes.

                Doesn't sound like a lot... though I am from England and university is quite different: you sign up for a degree and do that for 3 or 4 years continuously. A lot more than 120 hours, but I'm guessing credit hours and hours spent working on the degree are different?

                On the mathemati

                • by narcc ( 412956 )

                  A lot more than 120 hours, but I'm guessing credit hours and hours spent working on the degree are different?

                  Yeah, the naming is very confusing. Credit hours (sometimes called 'semester hours' or just 'credits') are generally the number of hours of instruction per week. A typical course will earn you 3 credits. A student will need to take ~40 classes to satisfy the requirements for an undergrad.

                  We also have quarter credit hours which are worth 2/3 of a semester hour. No, really, I'm not making that up. It's used by schools that divide the academic year into three terms ... called quarters. It's a minor mirac

    • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      why cool things only,(depemds on the definition of cool), but i weould say making a program that balances a chemical equation (depends on what level of education we're talking about ofc)or solves an equation. Not glamorous but certainly useful and it shows some mastery in other subjects. That said if someone produces tetris or hangman that should also give high scores. As long as they show a bit of engagement and have a good go at it. Ofc the higher up the system you get the higher the expectations will be.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There's a lot of crap online too. Dubious Stack Exchange answers, out of date documentation for even more out of date frameworks that were a bad idea even back when they were current. It's also a lot faster if you can just ask the teacher to explain something, in many cases.

      Kids need help getting started too, getting motivated to put in the work. If they can steered towards something that gives immediate results and isn't too hard to understand, it can set them on the right path. I think I mentioned this be

  • Maths education (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @04:37PM (#62703416)
    The USA really, really, really needs to improve & augment its K-12 maths education programmes. Ain't nobody going nowhere in CS without maths.
    • From time to time I read articles written by people in higher education who advocate for dropping college level math requirements for most students, and dropping algebra and above from the HS curriculum required for college admission. Almost invariably, they also assert that the world would be a better place if only the engineering students were required to tack on a couple of years worth of liberal arts classes. (Liberal arts sans math, that is; the classical definition included plenty of math.)
      • That's to appeal to teachers in both primary & secondary education who claim (admit?) that they aren't confident at teaching maths. They're open, frank, & clear about it. They also had poor maths education when they were pupils. Additionally, parents who had poor maths education & are not confident at maths also tend to pass on their lack of confidence to their children when they help them with their homework. There's a whole lotta maths phobia going on. It's very similar in other western OECD c
        • by gtall ( 79522 )

          That's the crux, there's no constituency for math education, at least in the U.S. Years of generating teachers weak in math combined with parents who never "got it". Worse, the Democrats lack of support for math came from their fear tech used in the military and large tech companies. The Republicans worry that if kids learned math then their specious arguments that ignore statistics would be worthless. They also support home-schooling which means that if the parents do not know math, their kids won't either

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      The vast majority of rank and file IT and development does not require math knowledge beyond basic algebra. I'm not saying higher math education is "useless", only that jacking up the math requirements may filter many out who otherwise would do just fine in non-cutting-edge IT.

      • I do business software (probably the commonly done) and have never needed more than HS Algebra, certainly not Calculus. It's amazing how often parts of the job look like those word puzzles from Algebra class where you have to "find the value for X". I've worked exactly 1 job in 30+ years where Calculus could have been useful, but they hired a person with a Masters in Math to do that part and she liked it (more power to her, it's was for a simulator for gravel packing oil wells, so not a common thing, I did
    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      Ain't nobody going nowhere in CS without maths.

      CS? absolutely. The glorified trade school version of "CS" that so many programs are these days? Not really.

      I know a lot of programmers like to fancy themselves mathematicians, but it's just that -- a fantasy. The truth is the average developer isn't going to even need so much as high school algebra in practice. They're not doing much with Boolean algebra either.

    • ^This. I have dyslexia that went undiagnosed until highschool, teachers just thought I was dumb/not applying myself. Failing math classes all through elementary school and middle school, they would just push me through to the next level anyway, as the teachers got bonuses based on their amount of passing students. (this was in the State of Rhode Island in the 90's, which at the time was ranked 49th in the USA's education system, only slightly better than Texas) My family moved to NY, where the education sys
    • Math is hard.
  • Terrible idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @04:48PM (#62703448)

    "requiring a computer science credit for high school graduation."

    This is a terrible idea. There are already real, fundamental problems getting high school kids through the base curriculum that generally society wants kids to have learned. This will either result in more kids failing to be awarded full academic diplomas, or will result in the definition of high school computer science being further dumbed-down to the point that it's essentially useless.

    Even calling most existing high school computer programming classes 'computer science' is probably carrying it too far, when the computer programming fundamentals are really all that's taught. I don't expect high school students to manage a large code-base or to take a novel project from its initial conception through whiteboarding, division of labor, pseudocode, allocating back-end resources and dependencies, and finally actually coding it into the relevant language. The fundamentals of committing lines to a compiler and getting reasonable results back are quite important, don't get me wrong on that part, but that's simple computer programming.

    • Public school is already pretty much a lost cause, in my opinion. Political squabbling has watered it all down to the point of uselessness.

      People demand results, and the metric they use is high grades. After that demand filters through the political grinder all that is left as an option is grade inflation. The subject in question doesn't matter, the result is the same: high grades that mean nothing and are worth nothing.

      You can get a better education for your kid through private schooling or even home sc

  • Compared to 70’s when computers were inaccessible. It was thought computers were the heavy liftoff the discipline needed to takeoff. IT entered a a lowered bar with lowered requirements and wages.

    Security, crimes against learning how thing work and network obfuscation have done a great job islanding CS. Mathematics opened a pathway into the hallowed discipline only for algorithms to be automated into deep learning AI.

    No wonder kids think AI owns the CS discipline.

    • Computers in the 70s were used for a different purpose than today. Personal computers were just taking off (the domain of the "Elitist" hobbyists?). Beyond that, only Big Business and the government used computers to any appreciable extent, whether cabinet or hall-sized behemoths. So maybe, just maybe, CS was more accessible because it was only those relatively simple pieces of code that could run in those things, not, say React JS?
  • Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by michael_cain ( 66650 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @04:59PM (#62703482) Journal
    The first question the CEOs need to answer is "Why do your companies push so much CS talent out of the business once they reach an age of 45 or 50?" The US is not short on CS talent already educated. It's short on talent already educated that is young enough to accept insane hours and low pay.
    • Seriously, this.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Indeed! It's a lot like a sports career.

      Perhaps there is natural burnout after converting the same app through fad 1, then fad 2, then fad 3, etc. It's hard to stay enthusiastic in such a Sisyphean field.

      The field needs Fad Cops and Parsimony Cops. Warren Buffet has hinted the investment fields is also full of fads, charlatans, change for the sake of change, etc., and part of his secret to wealth is lacking fear to say "no" to industry peer pressure.

      I remember how OO became "a thing" in the mid 90's and eve

  • by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @05:11PM (#62703502)
    What about all the others??
  • And welders.
    Every child should have a knowledge of basic metallurgy.

  • Perhaps instead we should simplify our stacks and standards. Web stacks are convoluted and bloated beyond reason. There are too many layers and components to master and debug. I can't speak for all domains, but "ordinary" CRUD takes roughly 3x the code and coding time than the 90's. We still have some around and they still do their original job just fine. But they aren't designed for newer versions of Windows and vendors stopped supporting the IDE and/or tooling.

    I will agree web technology is more flexible,

  • The main focus should be on providing equitable access to resources like laptops (not just Chromebooks) and good internet for those interested.

    The main problem is that there is just not enough teaching resources to make access to programming classes in every high school (forget K-8) without some tectonic shifts in how educators are educated, hired and paid. For the schools that can find those teachers, that's great. AP credits for college are good thing for college bound students.

    Some people will think that

    • I so thoroughly agree with everything you said.

      You want to get more people that can be programmers, I say: More art and music. Period. They are skills that teach you to practice, to create and to work with others. More writing and reading. This teaches about communicating ideas...One advantage of this is we get more generally educated people versus just economic fodder. You know, people that actually think than just have to survive.

      This, so much. The problem is that the elites don't want people who are generally well-educated, who think for themselves and are independent. If you think I'm being paranoid or unreasonable I suggest you read John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education [tripod.com]. I don't agree with everything he says, but his history lessons are illuminating.

  • Why dont these tech executives show potential kids how much rock star coders make.

  • MBAs NEVER have a brain amongst the lot. Pushing for CS ALONE and without a plan is just stupid
  • Before trying to teach "CS", whatever that entails in this proposal, I want to see schools teaching kids basic computer skills. As a college instructor, I need to have students do things like download a zip file, create a folder for a project, and then unzip the zip file into that folder. In recent years, I get blank stares when talking about creating a folder. Students are used to just saving a file and it automatically goes into "My Documents" and then they can search/browse for it later. But I'm teaching

    • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      you are starting to see the start of the "everything's a sandboxed app" generation abstarctions like files and folders are not things they are used to. s "My documents" becomes "the place the pc apps put data" they don@t see it as a folder on the ssd but as a dumping ground for data.
      • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        Ok sorry for replying to my self but I just realised something, and slashdot lacks edit. The "everything is an app" generation might just see filenames as a labels not even thinking about them as files oing into a container (folder/directory). dealing wit zip foiles is somthing they proobably has not done manually before.
  • How is public school going to teach "computer science," let alone computer literacy, to people who can't afford to have a computer in their home? Seriously, they've been charting the success of students whose parents have books in the home versus those who don't for decades.

    • I recently got an older Chromebook off eBay for $40.

      Including the built-in UPS!

      I think the seller had 300 or so on hand. Rich school systems get new Chromebooks every few years and "recycle" the old ones.

      The CS kids can install open firmware and GNU/Freedesktop/Linux no problem.
       

    • How is public school going to teach "computer science," let alone computer literacy, to people who can't afford to have a computer in their home? Seriously, they've been charting the success of students whose parents have books in the home versus those who don't for decades.

      This really isn't an issue anymore. Virtually everyone that wants a computer now has one, down to some of the poorest. You can get used ones cheap on Ebay. This isn't the 90's. The "Digital Divide" is long dead with the advent of cheap smart phones and tablets. The problem here is that an increasing number of kids do not have and don't want a PC, because they get all their digital needs from a combination of their smart phone (texting, internet, pics, music), and their game console. If you can afford an X-B

  • by theodp ( 442580 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @10:42PM (#62704178)

    Over at ceosforcs.com [ceosforcs.com], the CEOs for CS are celebrating that the Governors acquiesced to their K-12 CS demands after just 48 hours: "We are thrilled to see this support across the United States. There is now broad consensus that computer science should be part of the K-12 core curriculum."

  • The US needs a culture shift where learning is cool.
    Where education gets shit done.
    Where higher education is a welcoming warm bath of challenges and knowledge, instead of an elite circlejerk aimed at forcing people into debt and profiting of them.
    Where parents understand that their children need to learn to read, and to speak properly, and to be encouraged to learn, and to learn manners, which are an underrated tool to help them through education.
    And where those parents actually can make a living and ha
  • With education being "woke" and teachers who can't figure out the difference between men and women and Zoom classes and minorities being told that studying and working hard are white people's ethics, we'll be lucky if our schools can teach kids to balance their checkbooks or write a one-page essay on any subject they choose. Tech companies better hope the government allows more H1B visas in the future.

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