Every time this is brought up, there's pearl clutching and handwringing from technical and non-technical folks alike. The fretting goes, "What about the people who don't like it? What about the people who have no aptitude for it?" And to this I ask:<p>What makes programming so special that we should shield people without aptitude from learning it?<p>Many have no aptitude for language – we still require english classes. Many have no passion for the sciences – we still require studying chemistry and biology. Some could care less about history – but every year of high school typically includes a history class scoped to one period or region.<p>So why should programming be different? Why should we shield people from learning a subject which has ubiquity equal to language or mathematics, and infinitely more lucrative application? Why should we accept a substantial chunk of our population being illiterate on a discipline whose misunderstanding can have terrible consequences for both individuals and society at large?<p>Understanding how a computer works, in a world dominated more and more by technology, places you at great advantage. Ignorance of the same leaves you at the mercy of those who are technically proficient and, more and more, limits your lifetime income potential.
I'm not feeling good about the trend of teaching everyone how to program. There are other skills that are equally as viable, if not more so, and there are a ton of people who wouldn't be able to cut it, anyways.<p>Grant it, we all have our weaknesses (I have terrible rote-style memory so I did terrible in History), but I don't think that purposefully pushing kids into classes were there is a chance over 50% can't get a grip on it is a good idea. As an elective course, it is great, but should be no more mandatory than a foreign language or requiring people to master pre-calculus before graduating. I mean, with programming being so mathematical, why would you mandate students to program when so many struggle to get past algebra in high school?
Sensationalized article title. The text reads<p><pre><code> The president suggested that with the high interest in digital technology among
young people it makes sense to teach skills like programming and graphic design
in high school so that students can go on to pursue a career, with or without a
four-year college degree.
</code></pre>
which seems like a reasonable position to take. Doesn't say "mandatory" or "required" anywhere.<p>EDIT: I'm wrong. The very first line of the article:<p><pre><code> President Obama says he wouldn't mind seeing a curriculum requirement for
American high school students to learn a programming language.
</code></pre>
Still, mentioning it offhand in a google hangout seems very different than introducing it into legislation.
I've been teaching computer programming to high school students for close to 15 years. In that time, I've seen the demand grow more and more as the stigmatism of computer programming being a "geeky" or "uncool" pursuit has slowly dissipated.<p>The types of skills taught in computer programming courses -- abstraction, high-level problem solving, complex logic -- are ones I believe all students should have some level of proficiency in by the time they leave high school.
Seeing how required programming classes in university (several MATLAB courses freshman year for all engineering students) affected the attitudes my peers had towards my work, I have to be opposed to this.<p>Forcing people without an aptitude or interest to take some sort of "one size fits all" coding course is going to perpetuate myths and misconceptions about the industry. It is better for students to know that they don't know what programming is like than for them to <i>think</i> they know, and think it is awful.
Does this really come as much of a surprise? It's pretty much as loaded as a question can get, no politician will ever disagree with that question posed to them because saying no would just make them look bad.
The words he used for his actual endorsement didn't scream "MANDATORY CODING" to me: "I want to make sure that (young people) know how to produce stuff using computers and not just consume stuff."<p>Yes, it could mean coding. But people produce stuff on computers without coding all time. They produce stuff on Photoshop. They produce stuff on Excel. They produce stuff on Wordpress.<p>It's becoming increasingly clear that economic growth and wage growth are becoming uncorrelated in the US. For example, startups add billions and billions of dollars to the GDP of the US, but we'll never hire the millions of people that got laid off at steel factories over the past twenty years.<p>The economic model for the US this century is essentially one that consists of high-skilled knowledge workers, high-end manufacturing, and local service workers. Everything else will be subject to economic factors outside of US control. Lower-skilled manufacturing has had a revitalization in the US over the last couple years, but that's mostly due to things like China's currency appreciating, the price of oil remaining high, and a natural gas boom in the US. If any of that changes, those jobs will go back to China. Or Singapore, or Africa, or anywhere else where the supply of raw human capital is cheap.<p>If you view the future of the US economy in this lens, then everything Obama talks about makes sense. For example, if this is the future, then the safety net programs we had in 1980 are inadequate in 2013. Nobody really debated health insurance in the US in 1980, because over 80% of Americans already received health insurance from their employer. Now it's barely two-thirds [0]. If you have a "top-heavy" skills distribution in the US, and your income is more strongly related to skills than ever, then you need a "top-heavy" tax code. Or you could just let people bleed to death in their bathroom because they tried to pop their own thrombosed hemorrhoid (trust me, don't google it) because they couldn't afford a trip to the ER.<p>And to tie it back to the OP, it also means education for those high-skilled jobs will be the best way to ensure economic advancement. It's no longer a sure thing to advance economically by putting in your time in at the plant and have your labor union negotiate a 5% raise for you every two years. That doesn't need to mean everyone becomes a programmer. We'll still have manufacturing jobs, but they'll require more than just punching the clock every day[1][2].<p>We've all probably worked with a self-taught programmer who was toiling away at some crappy job until they either got a degree or made enough web sites to convince a company to hire them. And they probably tripled their income in the process. So I see Obama's statement as saying we should streamline that process as much as we can, and orient our education system to produce as many high-skilled workers as possible.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/study-fewer-employers-are-offering-health-insurance/2012/04/24/gIQAfGH6eT_blog.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/study-fewe...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/business/economy/02manufacturing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/business/economy/02manufac...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the-bills.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-t...</a>
I have home-schooled kids and have planned to start my daughter in Code Academy. Knowing how to code is a leg-up in the digital age. However, it's not for everybody. We still need those with basic trade-skills who seem to be getting kicked to the curb in favor of someone in China who could do the job cheaper. (If we want to build the American economy we are going to have to become self-sufficient inside of our own country again and have no trade-deficit.)
Absolutely. Every student should get one semester covering basic computer skills. That semester should include a short unit on how computer algorithms work in the most basic possible sense. I see no reason why every school child shouldn't understand if/then/else, looping, and hello world in one simple language. It only needs to be a quick demo in order to expose them to the idea of being a programmer.<p>We all had to take one semester of home economics and shop. Those classes weren't simply fluff even if we thought they were. They were also exposing us to useful life skills that could translate into jobs if we found the classes interesting. While sewing and cooking tend to be low wage work, they also exposed us to drafting, CAD, CNC milling machines, and other job skills that may have seemed more useful before China took those jobs away. We all had to take these classes even if we were destined to become programmers.<p><i>Far more valuable</i> than high school classes though would be adding computer clubs and contests at younger ages. Why would we wait until college ACM competition to make programming a rewarding skill? Computer skills are more important than chess or junior high football.
I'd rather we spend more effort fixing our broken system and actually trying a lot harder to make sure our high school graduates are all functionally literate.
I've grown to believe that learning to code is similar to what learning to write was 200 years ago. You can't be a good engineer, scientist or even artist without knowing it. A few people who excel at it will have great impact on our society. Within 50 years, every single kids out of high school will know the basics of it, or have very limited choice in higher education.<p>This is a good thing. Do your kids a favor, teach them how to code.
No. It doesn't make sense at all.<p>It comes to me that teaching code in high school is a bad idea. It is a good idea to teach how to solve mathematical problems with a programming language. Just as a mathematical tool.<p>It's curious how teaching "how to code" is going to greatly devalue the "coding-ability". Here, in Spain, coding is highly undervalue mainly because a lot of mathematician and physics and graduated in politics ( I mean, everybody) learned "how to program" in a one month course. So enterprises tend to think "anyone can code" instead of "I should hire professionals".<p>And it's true. Those people know how to solve problems with a computer language, but they DON'T produce good software solutions (just generalizing) and you end up having a big ball of mud. This shouldn't be a problem if enterprises would have realized about software quality and maintenance. But they haven't.<p>The consequence of all this it's clear. Very low salaries and an undervalued profession.<p>--- Aren't you agree with me?
Just have a look to the web. Most of non CMS web pages full of bells and whistles are clearly a mess. In fact, I really believe that most of web-related technology is a big ball of mud (HTML+php+javascript+css+json+...) because the main users/creators are not computer scientists. Yes, these technologies are a solution but I don't believe they're a good solution. (I'm not saying I could make it better, I'm just talking about the mess involving building a web page against building computer software).<p>---<p>Nevertheless, don't take me wrong. It's great to bring programming closer to the people. It's great to have a lot of people improving, creating, developing and designing. But people won't never understand that coding is different than building software.
This needs to be introduced (in a much more basic form) well before high school. You have to get it into the average child's head before the age of 5, or it will never stick or be easy to understand, just like learning a new foreign language. And it should be taught in the same way (just not like they do in public education, but in a more modern way that is proving to be more effective).
Where I come from, students choose subjects they wish to specialise at the age of 12. One of these specialisations was computer studies, which gives basic knowledge of various topics someone working in IT might need. One of these was programming.<p>It was poorly taught. Half of the class couldn't even figure out loops, they were literally scared of them coming out. They absolutely hated it.<p>I chose to continue studying this subject at sixth form (basically the local equivalent of high school) and even though we were now taught by engineers and people with doctorates, they were horrible. They just spoon fed us, giving us programs to study by heart. They had no idea of code redundancy, modularity or readability.<p>These were for students who chose to study the subjects. What the situation would be like if these courses were compulsory.
I feel like this would be a shortsighted move. It is my experience that coding takes a certain manner of thinking. This thought process (structured, boolean and logical [formal logic]) does not come naturally to many (most?) people.<p>In highschool i took my first formal programming course, and despite a very good teacher, the majority of my classmates struggled. I can say i saw similar results in my early college programming.<p>I love the idea of introducing more people to programming, but from my experience, this would be setting a majority of students up for struggles and failures. The few who would succeed will instead be distracted by the rest.
Given some famous wisdom that approx 50% of the population is not able to code, this doesn't make much sense IMHO.<p>Tools become better, many people will never need to code to become productive. One tool that allows people to do fancy stuff without coding is Excel. In fact the whole MS Office suite has means to create automatizations that would take a coder a long time to realize from scratch.<p>On the other hand I would be in favour of mandatory HTML classes. It's a purely descriptive language, used in many fields. (But who knows, that skill might as well become obsolete when MS releases Frontpage 2020 RT.)
It may be a flash in the pan, but I'm starting to see the commoditization of programming talent here. Back in 1999/2000 we saw a rash of "learn computer repair and network administration by CD!" companies, accompanied by "certificate mills" pumping out brain dumped-MCSEs by the boatload.<p>These days we're seeing a similar pattern with mobile development: "learn to program for the iphone! Make lots of money!" and to a lesser extent general computer programming.<p>The cynical part of me believes it's another sign of a bubble, but it may just be circumstance.
That's actually the way things worked in Ukraine when I was going to high school. Granted, it was programming in Basic, but everybody in junior and senior year had to take a course that combined keyboarding and programming.<p>Ukrainian (and post-Soviet) education system is somewhat different from US, as students can leave high school after their sophomore year, if their future plans involve going to a vocational school, community college or just straight to work. Only those who plan to enter college stay for the last two years.
I get nervous every time the federal gov't tries to mandate things in school. It always seems like something from either the 50 facts & fallacies of software development and/or the mythical man month. It's as if they realize things are screwed up so they try to slap some tape on the side and hope that fixes it.
I don't think I ever commented on this specifically. I'd like to go on record saying that even though I think everyone should learn basic programming, I can't support it as a required class for as long as the word "class" implies the terrible quality I currently associate with high school courses.
I don't get why everyone all of a sudden needs to know how to program. There's more to the world than the iOS SDK...why does every kid need to be able to write an app? I really don't understand.
High school is too late. It should happen in 6th-8th grade, but I'm not sure what class you would bump to make that happen. Maybe let it alternate days with foreign language?
Getting them through The Little Schemer (or something like it in another language) may be a good idea, but I'm a little skeptical of actually making coding mandatory.
It seems to me like a lot of the "required coding class" idea is based on a misguided desire to increase the competitiveness of our country internationally. Learning to program is good, yes, but to be honest, what goal are you trying to achieve? The article suggests that the goal might be to allow people to enter the job market more quickly.<p>The fact is that "programming" in and of itself is just grunt work. Forcing an entire generation to learn how to put strings together to do <i>stuff</i> won't help any of them when they go to a job interview and see a hundred other interviewees with the exact same proficiency for copying snippets from websites.<p>Problem solving is the much more important thing here, and that is already focused on in high school (remember word problems?). Programming allows students to explore problem solving more interactively, yes, but requiring schools to teach programming won't help in the long run any more than emphasizing a more comprehensive and intuitive approach to solving problems - I'm sure there'll be enough of <i>those</i> by the time these guys graduate to last forever. :)
If Obama cares about education, he can start by dismantling the 'No Child Left Behind' apparatus.<p>It is the most concrete impediment to responsive education I've seen in my lifetime.