Comment Re:yes, they do! (Score 1) 1104
"Why offer a programming course??"
Because school is where children go to learn basic stuff they will need in every day life and to see stuff they might never ever use again _but_ if nobody shows them, they might not know that they like it. I'm not promoting mandatory programming courses, thats BS, just like art is a BS subject to teach in school for years and years. I was always bad in art and will never be good at it and I really don't know why I had to draw countless water colour paintings during my school life. Give kids the choice. Here in Germany (at least in my state) there were courses in I think 9th and 10th grade, where pupils could choose between different subjects and one was a programming course. They used turtle to teach basic programming skills. I chose a mixed geography/chemistry subject which made me choose chemistry as one of my major subjects during 11-13th grade. Later on, from 11th grade to 13th grade, there were real programming courses where we learned about search algorithms, binary trees etc. and basic complexity analysis of those algorithms/data structures. Oh yeah and we used ELAN and Pascal as languages. Oh ok and we learned about a turing machine doing "busy beavers". But it was to no end mandatory.
"If he/she will never write one single line of code in his/her life... why teach programming? Isn't it more important to learn skills you might actually use?"
As said, just offer kids the choice to try it. Offer them the choice to try art, maybe make it mandatory for grade 1-6 or so, but don't force them to do it until they leave school. That was time I could have learned programming on my own at home. Instead I made countless bad paintings. So, your question is completely right, why force me to do something I will never ever do again in my life?
"But in no way is programming an essential tool for PC literacy!"
No, of course not. Common sense and being able to read what is on screen right in front of you are far more important for computer literacy but even people trained in using word and excel lack that ability to a great extent. And many consider that as computer literacy, which is wrong.
Because school is where children go to learn basic stuff they will need in every day life and to see stuff they might never ever use again _but_ if nobody shows them, they might not know that they like it. I'm not promoting mandatory programming courses, thats BS, just like art is a BS subject to teach in school for years and years. I was always bad in art and will never be good at it and I really don't know why I had to draw countless water colour paintings during my school life. Give kids the choice. Here in Germany (at least in my state) there were courses in I think 9th and 10th grade, where pupils could choose between different subjects and one was a programming course. They used turtle to teach basic programming skills. I chose a mixed geography/chemistry subject which made me choose chemistry as one of my major subjects during 11-13th grade. Later on, from 11th grade to 13th grade, there were real programming courses where we learned about search algorithms, binary trees etc. and basic complexity analysis of those algorithms/data structures. Oh yeah and we used ELAN and Pascal as languages. Oh ok and we learned about a turing machine doing "busy beavers". But it was to no end mandatory.
"If he/she will never write one single line of code in his/her life... why teach programming? Isn't it more important to learn skills you might actually use?"
As said, just offer kids the choice to try it. Offer them the choice to try art, maybe make it mandatory for grade 1-6 or so, but don't force them to do it until they leave school. That was time I could have learned programming on my own at home. Instead I made countless bad paintings. So, your question is completely right, why force me to do something I will never ever do again in my life?
"But in no way is programming an essential tool for PC literacy!"
No, of course not. Common sense and being able to read what is on screen right in front of you are far more important for computer literacy but even people trained in using word and excel lack that ability to a great extent. And many consider that as computer literacy, which is wrong.
