Category Archives: Education

Is Programming The New High School Diploma?

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Daniel Markham makes the case for incorporating programming into what we consider literacy in his post “Programming is the new High School Diploma”.

I’m not sure I’d go as far as he would, but this is not an idea to dismiss out of hand as quite a few folks did in a Metafilter thread I was following that led me to post the following:

Actually there are many, many folks circling in on the idea that programming *is* part of a new definition of literacy.

I believe people should have basic programming skills, in as much as they have basic writing skills.

NOT simply to ‘know how a computer works’. Programing is far more than the act of giving instructions to computers to do things.

The idea isn’t to create more programmers/software engineers/computer scientists, just as teaching writing isn’t done for the sole aim of creating more authors (although it more easily opens the door). Instead, programming should be taught as a means to explore science, health, social studies, history, and math. Just as reading and writing are. Instead of creating a book report, create an interactive story with visualizations. Maybe work with other students in its production.

Even the most rudimentary programming skills enable us to better communicate with one another, to tell stories, to create our own games, and to better participate in the networked world we live in.

New tools like MIT’s Scratch are coming along to make much of this possible. Check it out.

Related:

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Nurturing A Video Game Industry In Philadelphia

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NewsWorks posted a story, back in December, on “Philadelphia Game Lab”, an organization I’m helping advise led by idea-machine Nathan Solomon whose energy and passion is infectious. Read it: NewsWorks: “Nurturing a nascent video game industry in Philadelphia — NewsWorks”.

Tonight there is a game scene event at Barcade.

Earlier This Month The Commodore 64 Turned 30

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Cheap, accessible, it opened the doors for many children to their careers today and families had a lot of fun a long the way.

The six months I had one, and the time I spent with my friend Steve’s 64, left a long term impression on the course of my life.

reghardware: “The Commodore 64 is 30 • reghardware”

“We need to teach kids to code. All of them.”

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Andy Young writes the post I’ve been gearing up to, this is a great read, if you have children, of any age, take a few moments and read the whole thing: “Coding for Success”:

…The computer stands with the greatest developments in modern humanity (and has made many of the other great developments possible). Let’s not just brush over such a crass truism, though – what do we mean by this, exactly?

Computers are tools for automation – fundamentally of calculation (“computation”) but which can be applied to endless tasks, once we factor in the multitude of peripherals and interfaces now available. Computers help us automate and repeat the many complicated steps that make up the search for the answer to some of our hardest problems: whether that’s a biologist attempting to model a genome or an office administrator tasked with searching an endless archive of data.

The use of tools is a big part of what make us human, and the computer is humanity’s most powerful tool. When David beat Goliath or when today’s researcher makes a breakthrough, it’s the tools that help us win.

…Yet the majority of us are entirely dependent on a select few, to enable us to achieve what we want.

…The ability to code is what brings the power of computing to the masses. We need to break away from a culture where we consider people to be “technical” or “non-technical” – not everyone takes to literature or eloquent composition of prose, but we need to attack the phenomenon of the “non-technical” in the same way that we tackle illiteracy.

Daphne Koller of Stanford on Technology as “Passport to Personalized Education”

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NYTimes: “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education”:

…our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.

How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.

Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.

Alistar Croll: “much of human interaction has shifted from atoms to bits”

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Read his post on O’Reilly Radar: “The feedback economy”:

In a society where every person, tethered to their smartphone, is both a sensor and an end node, we need better ways to observe and orient, whether we’re at home or at work, solving the world’s problems or planning a play date. And we need to be constantly deciding, acting, and experimenting, feeding what we learn back into future behavior.

We’re entering a feedback economy.

Unemployment of college grads 8.9 percent, only high school? 22.9 percent

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It is worth the investment – go to college. The help is out there to do so. It is more important than ever before.

NYTimes: “Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture – NYTimes.com”

Even if the degree of unemployment among Architecture graduates is higher than Engineers, I wouldn’t take the advice of the NYTimes’s story title too strictly. Unemployment is lower for ALL graduates and as Virginia Postrel explains, “Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy”.

And make sure to learn to program no matter what you choose. It is as important as reading and writing.