

Computers Are The Future, But Does Everyone Need To Code? - Taurenking
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/25/266162832/computers-are-the-future-but-does-everyone-need-to-code?live=1

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frostmatthew
I agree with Jeff Atwood's car analogy (everyone who drives shouldn't be a
mechanic) but I think it's beneficial to learn to code even if you never have
a practical need/use for it.

Much like we teach subjects such as history and biology without the
expectation every student will become a historian or biologist (or have a
practical use for what they learned in those classes), we should teach
programming for the indirect (not sure that's the best word) benefits. It's a
different way to think and to view things (abstraction), it teaches problem
solving skills (debugging), good learning habits (what to commit to memory and
what to know you can look up), and attention to detail (wow, missing a
semicolon did that!).

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Taurenking
I agree to a certain degree...Yet I find that cases like trying to teach
programming to kids still in junior schools or using a kickstarter to publish
yet another book (yes I'm looking at you ruby girl), is taking things to
extreme...

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gonewest
I don't see how learning programming is beyond the ability of a younger child,
provided the syllabus and the style of teaching is developmentally
appropriate.

I've seen elementary school kids mess around in Scratch and (without
necessarily knowing this is what professionals call these concepts) they are
learning about basic program flow, iterators, conditionals, event handlers,
Cartesian coordinate systems, etc. Not to mention basic literacy, such as how
to type, use the mouse, drawing sprites, recording audio, what it means to
"save" versus "save as..." etc.

At the end of the day this is literacy, and just like music class doesn't make
everybody Mozart, programming class won't make everybody Knuth or Stroustrup.
But it's still worth doing because everybody deserves to understand how to
think about and interact with the world around them.

