Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've taught programming on a volunteer basis to high school kids on behalf of a non-profit in NYC for the past two years. [0]

Rough thoughts:

* This is great news. I'm not the biggest fan of DeBlasio but this is a step in the right direction. There are too many bright and talented kids who never get exposed to computers or the field of programming. Getting to these kids and showing them that they're capable of manipulating the machines they use everyday is huge.

* There needs to be more effort put toward sourcing qualified teachers. I talked about this in more detail in another comment in this thread but a TFA equivalent might be a good idea.

* I'm pleased this is not a mandate to teach all kids programming. I've seen kids in my classroom who are there because they want to be with their friends. There needs to be a small amount of organic interest on the student's part.

* What will the curriculum be? Is it going to be AP CS which has serious issues around it and over-emphasizes theory over practice? I've found that---especially with high school kids---it needs to be fun and have immediate feedback involved (ideally visual).

Sidenote - if you're a programmer who lives in NYC and wants to make an impact now, consider volunteering for ScriptEd (https://scripted.org/).

[0] - http://dopeboy.github.io/teaching-code/

> it needs to be fun and have immediate feedback involved (ideally visual)

This is so huge - it's not just that it's exciting for students and a more rewarding way to show friends & family what you're studying. It's also a great overview of the field: AI, graphics, data structures, performance, network programming, discrete mathematics, concurrency, on and on. You never know what's going to resonate with someone and get them excited about pursuing CS further.

But it's also hard to get through to the CS academia establishment on this. I worked with a professor who struggled for years to get a game programming course accepted by his department. They kept rebuffing him because "games aren't serious." (He eventually left and started a very successful game programming track at a different school).

This was an Ivy League school, and they also seemed overly fixated on theory over practice. I think they had the mentality that in depth hands-on experience equals vocational school. I hope more of the teaching programs coming online now understand how engaging it is to just make fun things with code - and how it can still be a great learning experience as well.

One one hand I get academia and on the other hand I don't.

They might argue because it's computer science there should an emphasis on theory over the practice. And while the practice (individual technologies and languages) change rapidly, the concepts moreorless stay the same. There are also software engineering and informatics majors that bring in more practice.

On the other hand, most employers want kids from the "hard" disciplines. And academia knows this and actively promotes themselves based on these metrics. So why not be a little forward thinking and integrate more practical skills into the curriculum like version control, more team projects, more practice with web development, etc? The whole holier-than-thou mentality that you reference is immature and has got to go.

> I worked with a professor who struggled for years to get a game programming course

Was this at Cornell? Sounds familiar.

To be honest I didn't volunteer because the program expects "to teach during the school day (usually 8:00-9:30 AM) or during after-school hours (between 3:30 and 5:00 PM)" and that's not something most people can really afford.

Saturday is a different story.

Anyway, I also agree that computer science might not be the right word. When I was in junior high I was given a year long computer course but it was just teaching how to use Safari and the text editor on the old colorful Mac (that was back in 2003, 2004). But when I was in my 3rd grade in Hong Kong I was already beginning to learn how to use computer and then 4th grade learning HTML using DreamWeaver MX in school. We had a beautiful computer lab, not a classroom with broken chair and outdated computer. I am not a front-end guy but being able to just make a simple static webpage was really awesome.

I think they should teach how the whole agile project life cycle, give tech talk, build a couple projects on their own, think of it as a freshman engineering 101 class.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com