Teaching our kids to code: a clarification

[pozorvlak]

[This is a followup to Teaching our kids to codeWhen I say that I yearn for a mass-algorate society, I don't mean a society in which everyone has the level of knowledge of today's professional programmers. We live in a mass-literate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to write novels or sonnets or in-depth analyses of the politics of

Comments

[johnckirk]

"we do expect (almost) everyone to be able to do simple arithmetic and make sense of graphs."I think you may be overly optimistic there. For instance, here's a conversation I had recently

[pozorvlak]

I think you may be overly optimistic there. For instance, here's a conversation I had recently:

Hmmm, you could be right. That's pretty horrifying.

For a lot of people I know, if they wrote a program to control machinery then I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it!

Depends what the machinery is - I certainly wouldn't trust random members of the public to write code for dangerous machinery. But most (or at least many) machines are not dangerous.

what John said

[johnckirk]

Computers are magic. Actual magic. That's how much most people know about them. Hell, cars are magic. A fucking hot water heater is freakin' magic.. If you can copy and paste using keyboard shortcuts you're a goddamn technological wizard.

Maths is voodoo and English is a type of beer. "Well within the capabilities of everyone" is probably true in a biological sense, but the education system is still turning out functionally illiterate people who can't add two small integers together without using their fingers - I think shell scripting and database interrogation is quite a long way down a line that the government seems bent on tearing up and selling for scrap.

[andustar]

The interesting thing for me about this post is that I tend to think of myself as someone who is on the geeky side of the spectrum, but as far as I'm aware I've only ever done one of the three things on your list (the first - obviously it depends on what exactly you mean by the next two, but yeah). I wonder what that's all about.

I would have loved it if that sort of thing was in school though, totally, and I think you're very right that this sort of thing shouldn't be seen as an obscure specialist subject.