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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

Coding was an embedded aspect of the primary and secondary school mathematics curriculum through my (United States)public school education in the 80s and early 90s. In primary school, once every week or two we'd spend a class in the computer lab full of TRS-80s to work on Snake (a Logo variant).

In high school, I took 3 programming courses.

Did programming for kids go away and come back?

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Computers gained "multimedia" and the programming complexity to replicate all of the professional level programs increased dramatically. The BASIC prompt on a TRS-80 isn't as far removed from the everyday programs you would run on such machines. Why bother with programming when you have all these fancy distractions?

As a rural Canadian student the closest I came to programming was the Turtle Drawer on a Apple IIe in elementary in the early 90's and then HTML in high school at the turn of the millenium. There were no resources to do more and the teachers had no education in it.

Very similar experience to me. I grew up in the 90s in a suburb of Dallas, TX. The most interesting things we did in elementary school was play Oregon Trail on Apple IIe and make obnoxious sounds in Kid Pix once we upgraded to iMacs. In High School, a CS curriculum existed but hardly any interest or marketing the AP CS classes were made. HTML and web development classes started to make its way in late 90s.

There was no programming at all over the course of my education (started school in 1997). It wasn't even offered. Everyone who went on to major in computer science in college was self taught and self motivated.

Instead our computer education was focused on typing skills and microsoft office. I'm not sure what people are learning today. I was working with an undergrad recently, and had to teach him how to copy text from a log file and paste it into a notepad file and save it. The kid had no clue what to do, because he was raised on mobile devices which doesn't really have a concept of text files. Computer literacy has fallen by the wayside in education, and the writing has been on the wall for at least two decades now.

That was the same question I had!

I wonder if it was more regional or which school system you were in? I started stuff in 5th grade in the early 80s on a TI99.

The thing is it seems everyone even then wanted in on it. But not everyone could do it. Even fewer liked it. I do not see how that has changed much either. I ran a class for programmers a few years ago. By the 10th class they had all dropped out due to a lack of time and interest. I took and taught the class because I found the topic interesting. They seemed to only want in if it gave them some sort of advancement in their job. It would have if they had stuck it out. But it became 'too hard'.

Expectations in schools (for both what teachers could or should teach, and what students should be exposed to) changed. I think by the 90s priorities had shifted enough (and general exposure to computers was on the rise due to their increasing ubiquity) that teachers were refocused on other things. That was also the start of (in the US) the much stronger emphasis on "teaching to the test" (it existed before, but was getting worse). You had cutbacks in many parts of the school (like music, some athletics, arts, even shop) in order to maintain focus on the core subjects of math, English, history, and science.

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