Code.org Taps No-Code Tableau To Make the Case For K-12 Programming Courses
- Reference: 0175317823
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/10/24/1717213/codeorg-taps-no-code-tableau-to-make-the-case-for-k-12-programming-courses
- Source link:
> "Computer science education is a necessity for all students," argues [2]tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in its newly-published [3]2024 State of Computer Science Education (Understanding Our National Imperative) report. "Students of all identities and chosen career paths need quality computer science education to become informed citizens and confident creators of content and digital tools."
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> In the 200-page report, Code.org pays special attention to participation in "foundational computer science courses" in high school. "Across the country, 60% of public high schools offer at least one foundational computer science course," laments Code.org (curiously [4]promoting a metric that ignores school size which nonetheless was [5]embraced by Education Week and others).
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> "A course that teaches foundational computer science includes a minimum amount of time applying learned concepts through programming (at least 20 hours of programming/coding for grades 9-12 high schools)," Code.org explains in a separate 13-page [6]Defining Foundational Computer Science document. Interestingly, Code.org argues that Data and Informatics courses -- in which "students may use Oracle WebDB, SQL, PL/SQL, SPSS, and SAS" to learn "the K-12 CS Framework concepts about data and analytics" -- do not count, because "the course content focuses on querying using a scripting language rather than creating programs [the IEEE's [7]Top Programming Languages 2024 begs to differ]." Code.org similarly [8]dissed the use of the Wolfram Language for broad educational use back in 2016.
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> With its insistence on the importance of kids taking Code.org-defined 'programming' courses in K-12 to promote computational thinking, it's probably no surprise to see that the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education report was prepared using Python (the IEEE's top programming language) and presented to the public in a Jupyter notebook. Just kidding. Ironically, the [9]data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education analysis is prepared and presented by Code.org in a no-code [10]Tableau workbook.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~theodp
[2] https://advocacy.code.org/supporters/
[3] https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs/
[4] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/2024-state-of-computer-science-education-highlights-growing-investment-from-policymakers-continued-gaps-in-access-302282502.html
[5] https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/one-change-that-can-get-more-girls-students-of-color-taking-computer-science/2024/10
[6] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i8CTNtn7hgzCtMw1x_zV14IDnS5LuA22JcVTwQyShoI/edit?usp=sharing
[7] https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024
[8] https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/17/224204/codeorg-disses-wolfram-language-touts-apples-swift-playgrounds
[9] https://advocacy.code.org/report-data/
[10] https://www.tableau.com/
Teach critical thinking and medial literacy first (Score:2)
Programming is just a job skill until you get into at least a 200 level math course. We already have more programmers than we know what to do with thanks to India The last thing we need is a flood the market more.
Instead what we need is more critical thinking skills and more medial literacy skills so people aren't getting fooled by advertising and propaganda and other BS. Those are skills that will benefit them and the whole country for a lifetime and there's something you really need to teach when kid
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Sure, but at heart most teachers, like most doctors or most anything, are clock-punchers at heart. They can't be trusted to teach kids to challenge unjustified authority when they themselves depend on that unjustified authority to get through the day.
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Teaching critical thinking in public schools sounds great but is very problematic. There are a lot of religious people who don't want their kids questioning their beliefs, and any serious approach to critical thinking dives directly into the heart of that.
The same goes for political beliefs.
Also, from what I have read, the brain of a young teenager really can't do critical thinking, regardless of education. The necessary neural wiring isn't fully in place yet, and they need to get to the "late teen/early
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I think that teenagers are in fact excellent at critical thinking, as long as they are applying it to people they do not know. As for themselves and their circle, they're addicted to irrationality like smokers are addicted to nicotine. Make all the little plans you want; at the very first sign of trouble you magically find yourself with a cigarette in your hand as if the Easter Bunny himself put it there.
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> Programming is just a job skill until you get into at least a 200 level math course. We already have more programmers than we know what to do with thanks to India. The last thing we need is a flood the market more.
> Instead what we need is more critical thinking skills and more medial literacy skills so people aren't getting fooled by advertising and propaganda and other BS. Those are skills that will benefit them and the whole country for a lifetime and there's something you really need to teach when kids are kids.
I agree with you 100 percent. But there's a connection between those two observations that you haven't explicitly stated - and that connection is what I came here to comment on.
In addition to whoring the programming market so they can buy programming skills for burger-flipping wages, Big Tech also wants people who are NOT educated in history, psychology, literature, philosophy, and other such elements of critical thinking. Learning such "unimportant" curriculum elements might allow the would-be IT fodder to
SPSS & SAS? Are you kidding? (Score:2)
Almost no-one outside of academia uses these applications, and those that do are the very largest companies and government departments. If you look at job ads for data analysts, it's all Python and R. What on Earth are the people that run Code.org thinking?
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You think they think? From available evidence, they are deeply into ignoring reality.
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Almost all biotech and pharma companies use SAS. For many jobs in those fields SAS is an absolute must for employment.
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I bow to your superior knowledge. I am basing my claim on job ads in my field. So, OK SAS might be necessary for employment in biotech/pharma, but what about every other industry that employs data analysts? I note that you do not mention SPSS, so I suppose you accept my claim?
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Follow the money. It's the same as CompTIA getting embedded in the education system and making boatloads of cash off their certification testing by convincing schools everyone needs certification out of high school. It's ALWAYS about the money. Follow it and find the problems.
As a computer geek... No. (Score:2)
Coding isn't bad for teaching problem solving, organized thought, and project management. You learn to break down big problems into little ones, how to solve the little ones, and how the result of one solution affects all the problems that follow it.
You don't need C++ for that. Very few kids are going to become coders and those that do will be out of date by the time they graduate anyway.
So 'computers' yes, 'programming' yes, but not in the way or to the degree it's being pushed.
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I think our high school did a surprisingly good job of this back in the 80s. We had NEC 8-bit computers and yes we coded on them; but a lot of the course was off-machine instruction that talked about algorithms. I especially remember a video we watched about sorting which outlined a number of sorting algorithems. At the end it compared them in real time using a simple graphic. Then we coded up bubble sort and quick sort on the NEC. Funny thing about that--bubble sort completed in a reasonable time, but
Makes perfect sense... (Score:2)
The folks at code.org couldn't take code.org approved coding courses when they were young since they didn't exist yet.
And therefore they are computer illiterate and need to use tools like Tableau to process data.
Had they waited say 10 years, they could hire a code.org-approved educated kid to come in and handle their data processing.
Bad priorities (Score:2)
Time management, social skills (active listening or similar, not just "sort it out with the other kids and see what happens"), emotional self regulation would all be far more valuable places to start. After that, computer science belongs right in with electrical engineering psychology as something that might be broadly useful but not strictly necessary for everyone.
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Agreed, but try doing that 30 kids at a time when they have parents pissed that you're trying to brainwash them when they come home with ideas about how to behave that mom & dad don't agree with.
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Well, do the right thing or do the easy thing? If the second one gets chosen too often, things deteriorate rather badly.
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Do you cast informed votes for your local school board, and have you let your politicians know you support tax increases to pay for more teachers? Do you vote for state/provincial politicians who would support adding these things to the curriculum?
It's easy to say "do the hard thing", but not enough people are even trying, limiting themselves to bitching at the teachers. We get the society we collectively want as expressed by the efforts we go to for change.
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Does not work like that here.
Yes, it's a good idea... (Score:2)
...to teach kids the basics of programming, but few will be good at it and be able to turn it into a career. Talent is real
I disagree. (Score:2)
> "Computer science education is a necessity for all students," argues tech-backed nonprofit Code.org
Computer usage training is a necessity for all students. Computer science education should be available for those with interest and aptitude.
Not everyone needs to learn to code. Not everyone needs to understand how computers work. Everyone needs to be able to use one.
"20 GOTO HELL" (Score:2)
OH MY GOD, you can't have it both ways. Either LLMs are going to replace all coders next week sometime or we need to train every child in America to write code, not both.
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What about "neither"? LLMs will _never_ code competently and with simple things they are still hit-or-miss. The same is true for most people. Teaching everybody "to code" is a colossal waste of time and effort and entirely stupid.
They don't have to code completely (Score:2)
If an LLM increases a programmer's productivity by 20% the demand for programmers drops 20%. When demand drops price drops with it and when you're talking about programmers prices are wages.
And that's before we talk about all the process improvements and automation that's been going on. Not all in programming, a lot of it has been in general IT but those people who are content to work in a general IT career are now being forced to up their game or become homeless. A lot of them will wash out but a lot
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> If an LLM increases a programmer's productivity by 20% the demand for programmers drops 20%
That sounds like people who build highways and claim that adding another lane will decrease traffic by some proportional amount. It doesn't, people just use the extra lane to drive more.
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> That sounds like people who build highways and claim that adding another lane will decrease traffic by some proportional amount. It doesn't, people just use the extra lane to drive more.
It's worse than that. An extra lane can make travel times worse even with no increase in traffic.
This is known as [1]Braess's Paradox [wikipedia.org].
It is not just an odd psychological effect but an actual physical phenomenon. You can even design a circuit that will carry less current when a new zero-resistance path is added.
[2]Here's an example [quoracdn.net].
In the circuit, closing the red switch adds a new zero-resistance conductor, yet the total resistance of the circuit goes UP, and the current goes DOWN from 1.5 Amp to 1.0 Amp.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox
[2] https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-521dd4e99a32fdbf2330b1b45e89faa1
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> If an LLM increases a programmer's productivity by 20% the demand for programmers drops 20%.
This is the [1]Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org].
Every past productivity improvement has led to an increase in demand for programmers, which is an example of [2]Jevons Paradox [wikipedia.org].
> When demand drops price drops with it and when you're talking about programmers prices are wages.
Then why didn't wages collapse when compilers were invented?
> And that's before we talk about all the process improvements and automation that's been going on.
We've been automating for 300 years, and during that time, our living standards have risen twenty-fold.
Economics is not zero-sum.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
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"If an LLM increases a programmer's productivity by 20% the demand for programmers drops 20%."
You're assuming that the demand for programmers is static. That's a bad assumption. When something becomes cheaper--say, because it has become more productive--demand for it goes up. Oftentimes, people spend *more* on it because of the increase in demand. The price per unit of work decreases because of the increase in supply, but the money per worker increases because of the increase in demand.
"I never understa
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> If an LLM increases a programmer's productivity by 20% ...
That is, so far, an unsubstantiated _hope_. From what I have seen, it may well _decrease_ coder productivity, in particular if you take into account that the beginners never learn or much more slowly learn to do intermediate stuff, because all the easy stuff gets done by LLMs.
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Counterpoint: many of the things we teach in school are a little beyond all students getting, and many will never be used by the students, but still have value in 2 forms.
1. A broad-based education teaching many different skills helps students determine what they are good at and enjoy. The fact that 95% of my high school algebra-2 classmates were never going to multiply another matrix in their life after that class doesn't mean it was wasted effort, because some students found they excelled at it and were
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I mean, I more or less agree, but then again, I feel the same way about leatherworking or woodshop or literal basket weaving. But nobody agrees what education is for. I think that, among taxpayers, the sweet spot, the "butthole zone" if you will, of the Venn diagram of liberal-arts and vocational-skills advocates is pretty small when it comes to coding.
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Basketweaving and leatherworking have the ultimate problem of being outright defunct skills unless you want to make your money on the "hand made" upsell and charging 10-20x what those things cost when manufactured.
In some Chinese schools, along with English, Chinese, Science, and Math classes, they have "Factory class" where you learn to sit at a station doing simple jobs like soldering or stitching, which could be something beneficial here.
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> Basketweaving and leatherworking have the ultimate problem of being outright defunct skills unless you want to make your money on the "hand made" upsell and charging 10-20x what those things cost when manufactured.
> In some Chinese schools, along with English, Chinese, Science, and Math classes, they have "Factory class" where you learn to sit at a station doing simple jobs like soldering or stitching, which could be something beneficial here.
If they implemented that in the states it would turn into an unpaid internship. Have each student spend eight hours a day for a month working for a local business on the line. Make them cry. Teach them how much it sucks. That'll put the fear of being uneducated into 'em.
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> If they implemented that in the states it would turn into an unpaid internship.
In China, it is a paid internship.
The students work in actual factories and are paid wages.
Apple got in trouble over this because one of its suppliers in China was using high school interns and working them overtime. The kids were happy to earn extra income, but nonetheless, it is illegal for the factories to give them overtime work.
My spouse is Chinese and she did her internship in a car factory, installing door handles.
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>> If they implemented that in the states it would turn into an unpaid internship.
> In China, it is a paid internship.
> The students work in actual factories and are paid wages.
> Apple got in trouble over this because one of its suppliers in China was using high school interns and working them overtime. The kids were happy to earn extra income, but nonetheless, it is illegal for the factories to give them overtime work.
> My spouse is Chinese and she did her internship in a car factory, installing door handles.
I honestly like the idea of having kids go through a real paid job situation before graduation. A lot of folks never know what actual work is like until they're stuck having to provide for themselves. I worked a farm for years during the summers before I was out of school, and did the odd after school job during the winters, but I saw a lot of my peers skipping every opportunity to work until they had to. It's a pretty rude awakening for some of them. It'd go at least a little way toward preparing people fo
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We had woodworking, sewing and cooking. I found them enjoyable and all still useful to me 40 years later. If I had had a choice between "art", "music" and, say, metalworking or baking later on, I know what I would have selected.
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> When kids learn to "analyze the themes" of Catcher in the Rye ...
I read Catcher in the Rye in high school English class and learned a valuable lesson.
I learned that "literary experts" can tell people that garbage is great literature, and most people will accept that because they think it makes them look smart.
That lesson on groupthink can be generalized to many areas of life.
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For a certain subset of kids, American schooling is a great way to learn to distrust authority. Unambiguously.
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The same thing could be said of music. Most people will never even play for tips in a coffee shop; but being exposed to an instrument is still good. For the love of all that's holy though, not the recorder.
I've heard Canadian schools teach kids ukulele. So much nicer, and you can get a plastic uke for $20 retail, probably next to nothing if you sent them to schools. I was talking to a musician lately who told me about that and he said the big advantage is that not only are the frets close for small hand
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> The same thing could be said of music. Most people will never even play for tips in a coffee shop; but being exposed to an instrument is still good.
I disagree. Complete waste of my time. Repeatedly. For anybody that has an interest in it, sure. But forcing people? That just makes it clear some fuckups stuck in the past are dictating what you have to learn.
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> What about "neither"? LLMs will _never_ code competently and with simple things they are still hit-or-miss. The same is true for most people. Teaching everybody "to code" is a colossal waste of time and effort and entirely stupid.
Teaching code basics isn't a horrible idea, just so folks get a general understanding. But I don't see much point for the vast majority of going beyond the very basics. Show them hello world, show them a basic logic loop, and a switch, and give them a concept of how it works. Those that are curious will seek out more. Those that aren't will have their, "Ew," moment, and seek other avenues. But I don't think the idea of having some general knowledge is terrible.
But no, we do not need every single person to h
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> Teaching code basics isn't a horrible idea, just so folks get a general understanding. But I don't see much point for the vast majority of going beyond the very basics.
I agree. We had that in mathematics around 40 years ago. Some simple algorithms in BASIC and altogether 4 hours (as far as I remember) in the computer room. Theory in the weeks before, so we actually had a clue what the reason for this was (after having done these manually) and no searching for a fake "problem".
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Quote by Biden:
> Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well
[1]Source [newsweek.com]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-new-hampshire-campaign-code-1479913
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Or be US president! It's easy! No actual understanding of reality required. By that Metric, the US should _definitely_ elect Trump. Sure, it will all go down in flames in that case, but at least it will be entertaining.
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I came here to say, lets all remember that real world logic is not binary. Both and Neither are real truth values. Look it up.
The best thing about this is that LLMs understand multivalued logic better than you do