Comment by skadamat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skadamat | Hacker News Reader

The whole movement around "teaching kids to code" has been interesting to watch. Multiple goals seem to be conflated together (which isn't uncommon in education):

- Helping kids think in new ways

- Building skills for "the future" / "jobs"

- Encouraging kids to create their own things, instead of just consuming

- Probably some others I'm not thinking about! (e.g. improving odds of getting into an "elite" college)

Each tool, whether it's C or Scratch, should be evaluated against the design goals as well as the embedded context / environment that children are introduced to programming in. This is a rich topic undoubtedly.

My 2 favorite starting resources are:

- Learnable Programming by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

- Mindstorms by Seymour Papert: https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...

This conflation is unfortunate. The push towards teaching critical thinking and creative problem solving is the right direction, IMO, and introducing some basic programming tools can help with that. Unfortunately there are a lot of parents that don't see the value and just want their kids to "get good at computers" so they can find a good job in "the future." They badger the schools to crank up the "STEM stuff" so kiddo can grow up and nab one of those obscene starting salaries and be the next [insert infamous tech CEO here].

You forgot "drive the wages of coders down by inundating the market with people with who can write satisfactory code under pressure"

It's (unsurprisingly) met all the same barriers that other subjects have met in education.

The notion that there are visual learners etc. now doesn't seem to true (and possibly even a bit of a scam). But different approaches do appeal to different people and like any subject, teachers and students need to work together to find the ones that fit.

- Helping kids think in new ways (what teachers want)

- Building skills for "the future" / "jobs" (what politicians promise)

- Encouraging kids to create their own things, instead of just consuming (what I want)

- improving odds of getting into an "elite" college (what the parents want)

And:

- Encouraging parents to buy very overpriced toys

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