Obama wants you to learn code

[jagec]

<snip>
(I had all the right expressions in there for 9's, 4's etc, and the correct symbols, etc.)

He had this strange look on his face, like he had no idea what I just did. He failed me and told me not to come back to class.

Wow. I hope you kicked that up the chain of command.

 

[brandonb]

Wow. I hope you kicked that up the chain of command.

Yeah. I just edited my original post with the resolution of it.

 

[akahoovy]

You guys just got unlucky. South of Houston, my CS class ended up being a small group of students (me and a couple others) that were basically TAs and goofed around writing code while the rest of the mouth breathers tried to stumble through the "complexities" of hexidecimal numbers. And it got even better in CS2, because there wasn't enough to offer a full class. We got put into CS1 and had very few assignments. Just used the teacher as a resource for our own projects.

I had one class like that in high school in my senior year. It was pre-cal. We did half a semester out of the text book and we were done for the year. That was all the material required for the high school class. The next semester we could either leave class to do whatever or stay with Doc (the teacher) and play Yahtzee, as it was based on probability that we learned some about in the first semester.

 

[akahoovy]

...snip...

Wow. You did well for yourself, congratulations. That teacher was terrible.

 

[DrPizza]

I've attempted to teach some programming. Like others said, either your brain is wired for it, or it's not.

 

[mvbighead]

Wow. You did well for yourself, congratulations. That teacher was terrible.

Indeed. This type of thing confounds me. What in the sam hell is that teacher doing teaching programming class? At the very least, you run the code and check the results. In the land of code, there are often many ways to get a result. The teacher's code you provided is the one that "works" but could stand to be improved in a MAJOR fashion; and the one you would expect the lackeys to turn in.

 

[darkewaffle]

Not everyone grasped it, but my C++ class in high school was actually fairly competent, I would say at least 2/3 of about ~20 kids 'got it', but it was definitely a novice course.

I think it's a valuable skill though if for no other reason than it re-inforces important logical concepts.

 

[Saint Nick]

My CS class in high school was spent playing Action Quake 2 and Quake 3. I fucking hated that class.

 

[Uhtrinity]

It is an educational initiative run by CODE.org. So far I have put 140 4th through 8th graders through the first half hour session. It uses Blockley to teach programming fundamentals. You can click the link below and try the same challenges the kids do. They start out rather easy and get progressively harder. Also found that this style is really similar to FLL (First Lego League) and NXT programming.

http://learn.code.org/s/1/level/1

http://learn.code.org/

 

[Markbnj]

I've attempted to teach some programming. Like others said, either your brain is wired for it, or it's not.

Yes, and it doesn't matter much what form "programming" takes, either. People put a lot of hope in future interfaces and machines that can understand speech and communicate at a higher level. But until they can communicate at a very much higher level ("I need a bridge, computer, across that stream.") someone is going to have to decompose complex problems into microscopic pieces and feed them one at a time to a brick-stupid machine hoping all the while that no mouse-hair of variance from the required norms will cause it to be spit back in their faces. And it will have to be done under time pressure from people who have as little concept of what is being accomplished as the ancient Britons did of what the druids were doing in their groves, or perhaps less.

For some reason I find that fun and rewarding, but I haven't met many other people who would or do share that view.

 

[ultimatebob]

It is an educational initiative run by CODE.org. So far I have put 140 4th through 8th graders through the first half hour session. It uses Blockley to teach programming fundamentals. You can click the link below and try the same challenges the kids do. They start out rather easy and get progressively harder. Also found that this style is really similar to FLL (First Lego League) and NXT programming.

http://learn.code.org/s/1/level/1

http://learn.code.org/

I tried doing that Blockley class on code.org just for shiggles. It kinda pissed me off because it wouldn't let me edit the generated code to fix any mistakes I made

 

[Possessed Freak]

I taught BASIC to 3rd graders successfully. BASIC is great because of the draw command. The ability to actually see the concept of a loop drawing is a powerful thing.

The simple staircase with the DRAW command and a loop is something awe inspiring to the kids.

The "final" project was drawing a house. They could do it a lot of ways but the roof HAD to be diagonal, there had to be a door and a window.

I also taught the kids binary, including addition and subtraction.

 

[SheHateMe]

Obama, all I know how to do is Python


I can make a car in Turtle Graphics.




...Hire me?

 

[lxskllr]

For some reason I find that fun and rewarding, but I haven't met many other people who would or do share that view.

A lot of people feel the same way about math, but it's still mandatory(as it should be). I'd teach scripting in school. It's a little less rigorous than full programming, but is useful for day to day activities, and it helps reinforce logical thought processes. Not everyone's gonna love it, but tough shit. Even those that quit afterward will get a little something out of it, even if it isn't expressly coding ability.

 

[Markbnj]

A lot of people feel the same way about math, but it's still mandatory(as it should be). I'd teach scripting in school. It's a little less rigorous than full programming, but is useful for day to day activities, and it helps reinforce logical thought processes. Not everyone's gonna love it, but tough shit. Even those that quit afterward will get a little something out of it, even if it isn't expressly coding ability.

Yeah I don't disagree with that. To a great extent it's what lower schools should do: give everyone a chance to be exposed to different things and a path forward if they have an aptitude for something.

 

[Markbnj]

I taught BASIC to 3rd graders successfully. BASIC is great because of the draw command. The ability to actually see the concept of a loop drawing is a powerful thing.

The simple staircase with the DRAW command and a loop is something awe inspiring to the kids.

The "final" project was drawing a house. They could do it a lot of ways but the roof HAD to be diagonal, there had to be a door and a window.

I also taught the kids binary, including addition and subtraction.

I so agree with this. Programming became much less approachable when you stopped being able to just run BASIC off ROM on any PC and start entering lines of code that could actually do things. The very first thing I ever did in any programming language was to PRINT in BASIC.

 

[Train]

I so agree with this. Programming became much less approachable when you stopped being able to just run BASIC off ROM on any PC and start entering lines of code that could actually do things. The very first thing I ever did in any programming language was to PRINT in BASIC.

Commodore 64, flip the power switch and you had a basic prompt in under 2 seconds. That's how I started.

But nowadays you just need to know where to look. Hell you can have a prompt a million times more powerful than the C64 in a browser.

On the flip side, learning what to type was harder back then. Hard to believe I had to go to the library, check out books on basic. And if I hit the limits of the book, had to find a better book. So much at your fingertips with the internet today.

 

[akahoovy]

I think an initiative for people to learn to program is a good idea, regardless of who gets it when learning it. It could be a sort of blue collar position for the U.S.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

Yes guys, lets all learn CODING!!!!

You know, that shit that is outsourced in multiple corporations across the US? Yeah, that coding. Let's do that! Maybe next we can put "Learn to use a cash register".

Coding is something that we do consulting over these days.

Don't get me wrong, I love coding - My skills revolve around VBA, COBOL, Batch Scripting, AutoIT, and a tad bit of Java/Web-based. When it comes to automating tasks that otherwise take longer for short periods of time. Other than that, it's absolutely stupid to teach it as if it's some kind of lifesaver for our economy. As 2nd poster said, let's start with teaching this nation economics.

 

[smackababy]

I think an initiative for people to learn to program is a good idea, regardless of who gets it when learning it. It could be a sort of blue collar position for the U.S.

I think a large problem is being able to get CS teachers willing to teach. The starting salary of someone with a CS degree is a lot higher than most teachers.

 

[Wyndru]

We don't need more people to learn code, we just need the correct people hired in developer positions.

So many people these days just go into college thinking a CS degree will get them a secure job, then they hack their way through code copy/pasting snippets from google, hoping eventually that compiler will accept it and stop spitting out errors.

In the meantime, they have wasted time that a more qualified coder would have just written because he/she has a thorough understanding of the language.

 

[Markbnj]

Commodore 64, flip the power switch and you had a basic prompt in under 2 seconds. That's how I started.

But nowadays you just need to know where to look. Hell you can have a prompt a million times more powerful than the C64 in a browser.

On the flip side, learning what to type was harder back then. Hard to believe I had to go to the library, check out books on basic. And if I hit the limits of the book, had to find a better book. So much at your fingertips with the internet today.

All true, but you need that spark that gets the motivation up. Maybe today that is provided by the general high level of awareness that people have of computers and related subjects.

 

[Uhtrinity]

I think some of you are over thinking this. Some students will have a natural knack for coding and will choose to continue with a CS education. For the others they will get a chance to see a logical mathematical type process which can help out in other areas of education. This isn't about making all kids programmers. It is more about helping them be computer literate and logical thinkers.

Btw, on the video that started this thread. It surprises me how anything can be turned into a political argument. The video has 5500 likes and 2200 dislikes. Most are probably not aware that Obama is simply one of many "celebrities" that have chosen to support this initiative. No where near the number of likes / dislikes for Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.

 

[Vdubchaos]

The Supreme Court should learn code first, and the Constitution.

Ding ding ding

 

[Train]

All true, but you need that spark that gets the motivation up. Maybe today that is provided by the general high level of awareness that people have of computers and related subjects.

I find it hard to compare what I would be like as a kid today instead of the 80's. Would I be interested in learning how to create my own computer programs on a typical PC of today as I was on a C64? Would I be completely distracted by the millions of things to play with on the internet?

you could use the 64 just fine without having to learn to code, you just loaded programs and off you went. What was the spark then? At the time, home PC's were still emerging from the hobbyist space and into the consumer space. So a lot more of the literature around computers revolved around DIY type projects.

But even away from the PC, I was the kind of kid who took things apart, modified them, fixed them, or broke them even worse. Surely kids today who are the take-it-apart mindset look at a computer and think "how can I make something of my own?", "what's under the hood?", or simply just "how does it work?"