I was fortunate enough to listen to an hour long debate about ten years ago between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye on this subject at the National Science Teachers Association Conference. Tyson was on President G.W. Bush's manned spaceflight council and made the same basic argument you did, while Nye made an argument very similar to TFA - science now, humans later. At the end of the debate there was no clear "winner." I think most of the 300+ of us in attendance just walked away wishing that we put more money into both types of programs as they both have great value.

It always just comes down to money, and this is part of a much larger issue IMHO. Our government is not funding basic science at anywhere near the level they should. Everything is left to business, and as a result the vast majority of research being done is focused on immediate return (and profit), not on long-term gains.

I'm a public school teacher. The crap Dells my district buys last maybe 4 years before something major dies in them, and the warrantee only lasts 3. Keyboards and monitors generally last much longer (not so for the mice they way they are used by my elementary school kids, but they are pretty cheap to replace). The result is I have lots of extra monitors and keyboards, so the Pi, a vga or dvi adaptor, and maybe a mouse come out to $60, plus the plastic for our 3d printer to print cases. This was part of the plan from the profs in England who designed the thing to get it in the hands of school kids.

As for the Google tools, I just downloaded them and will play with them this weekend to see if they might be useful for my engineering club to work with. From TFA they look promising. If any of you want to volunteer to teach my 4th and 5th graders assembler, let me know. I haven't messed with it since I had an Atari 800. My goal is to allow them to begin learning to control their technology instead of just being passive users of it, and hopefully set them up for deeper learning later. HTML, CSS, Python, and Arduino's IDE have all been useful tools for me to do this the last few years, and I'm hoping to ad RPi to the lineup.

Or Rescue On Fractallas! An old favorite on my Atari 800xl.

I think that it is more parents, school administrators, and teachers. Just today a fellow teacher who had her 5th graders using Scratch to program solutions to math problems as a programming exercise was visited by our principal. The principal walked around and observed, asking the kids questions like "How will this help you in the future?" because that is apparently one way to assess teachers now. She had no clue what the kids were doing, or how it may help them understand math, logic, problem solving, or that they may find they have a talent, like, or even passion for it. We sent her a link to code.org with the hope that Gates and Zuckerburg endorsing something not in our standard curriculum may hold more weight than two rebellious teachers.

If coding is going to be more than a small elective in some middle and high schools, politicians and the educational bureaucracy need to believe that there is some value in it. They are the target.

Here's some data from Florida to back up your point. You have to conclude that either a) most teachers who teach in lower-socioeconomic schools are bad, or b) standardized tests assess student socioeconomic status better than teacher quality. I've worked in several Title 1 schools and from my experiences, teachers there work hard, put in more time, and work smarter than teachers at upper socioeconomic schools just because they have to.

I know that the politicians and testing and charter companies have done everything they can over the last few decades to convince you otherwise, but nothing pisses most teachers off more than when one of their students isn't learning and we do everything possible to help them.

http://shankerblog.org/?p=6248

I'm an elementary school teacher, and we have 2nd graders using Scratch at my school with great success. Having them create interactive multimedia may be a better way for you to start - create some characters, program them to do or say things in sequence and interact when they touch each other. Be sure to check out the in-program help section and print out the "Scratch Cards" as an easy way to get kids started. Also, check out http://scratched.media.mit.edu/ for lesson plans and ideas from teachers around the world.

Another idea - I just downloaded and started reading some documents on "CT" - Computational Thinking from ISTE and CSTA ( http://www.iste.org/learn/computational-thinking.aspx - free registration required to download). Haven't read it all or used it with kids yet, but it looks interesting. There are suggested activities that don't involve computers, similar to a few mentioned in previous posts to get kids to think about processes, algorithms, etc... including stuff for younger kids.

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about "Mars Bottles" in his Mars Trilogy 20 years ago. I'm glad someone is finally trying it!

I'm not a grad student at the Media Lab, and I'll second everything the poster above said. I've been using Scratch with 5th grade students for physics and even some simple ecosystem simulations (all student created) for about 4 years now. The programming language is simple enough to get out of the kids' way and let them create what they want. Whatever you are teaching - if the kids truly understand it they can show you by creating a sim for it, and if they don't understand it they have to figure it out in the process.

Gizmos are great, but pretty expensive... figure out when you are going to use them and start the 30 day trial right before you need it!