Please teach kids programming, Mr. President (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Please teach kids programming, Mr. President (2009)

startuplessonslearned.com

24 pointsnathanh17 comments

Decisions like this should be made at the local level... The author should talk to his local school district before pushing his untested ideas on the entire country.

The future strength of our economy depends on our ability to foster the experimentation and competition of ideas.

Inequity of access. Too many kids today don't have access to computers, cell phones, video games or other programmable devices.

"today" kids have greater access to technology than any time in history, including yesterday. Including 5 minutes ago.

Most of today's kids, yes. Not all of them. Lots and lots of low-income families don't have access to these things, and it's naive to think otherwise.

There are few people without access to the libraries with computers. (edit: in the U.S.)

Perhaps, but how many libraries in the U.S. would allow installation of developer tools on their machines?

Furthermore, if all the machine has IE6, web-based developer tools might be limited as well.

Access to a computer in a library is very often time limited and you're almost always limited in what you can do on the computer.

It's good that people can use library computers, but it's absolutely not the same thing as having your own computer.

Most people in the world don't have these things. They don't have a lot of things. Redistributing between some Americans and other Americans hardly does anything to reduce inequality, and it's naive to think otherwise.

As the offspring of one of those low-income families I reject your argument. Low-income families are incredibly resourceful. I also went to schools where the majority of students were low-income and the schoolboard still managed to install and network computers. Some students used them, most did not.

Just saying there should be more access to computers is pretty useless because with no desire to use one it's just an expensive paperweight (facebook terminal). Trust me, if those low-income students wanted a computer they could get one. We have 20 years of computer spare computer parts. There are enough computers produced to give to every person on the planet.

The bigger problem was how to use them. This was one of the goals of the OLPC program before it got caught in a proxy war with netbooks.

those kids that happen to not have access to technology are behind the ones who do by more than any time in history, including yesterday, including 5 minutes ago.

  1.  The future strength of our economy depends on its 
  ability to create, support, and sustain entrepreneurs.

Dead on.

  2.  ...They are in school, right now...

Very True.

  3.  They are nerds.

Wait what?

This piece is about catering to a niche subset of the potential future entrepreneurs not a superset of the future entrepreneurs as claimed.

I can't believe that anyone in the U.S. who has a roof over their head couldn't get a computer if they really wanted one.

There are plenty of computers similar to the one I use every day on eBay for under $50 http://computers.shop.ebay.com/PC-Desktops-/179/i.html?LH_BI... Old CRT monitors, keyboards, mice can usually be picked up for next to nothing. And if that is still too expensive there is always http://www.freecycle.org/ . If someone wants a free up to date OS, then Ubuntu will ship CDs for free: https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

You can pick up a Xbox with games for $35 http://cgi.ebay.com/Microsoft-Xbox-8-GB-Black-14-games_W0QQi... and they are hackable with Linux

You can pick up cell phones for next to nothing and many of them run Java apps.

I learnt to program on a BBC B (8bit, 32kb memory) computer I shared with my family and books from the local library. I'm not sure how "kids today don't have access to computers" compared to then. Back then computers and phones were expensive and now they are cheap. Also the internet is full of communities to help people learn programming.

Offtopic: everytime I land on startuplessonslearned.com I get an IE Operation Aborted dialog and an error page. This has occured every time for at least 6 months. Shame, I really want to read the articles. Browser: IE 7.0.5730.13 on XP Pro. (Work PC so no control over the setup)

Hit ESC at the right time and it should work for you.

Kodu Game Lab from Microsoft Research (http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/kodu/default.a...) is a really good way to get kids into programming. Disclosure: I worked on it.

An entrepreneur is not always a computer geek who starts a software company :)

And I think some of the more outgoing and sociable kids might be great entrepreneur too - you have to sell and selling requires energy to deal with people.

hey, for what it's worth, I commented on this blog post, when it originally went up, saying that it's better to be the change you wish to see, HINT HINT, which means (in other words) I think it would be cool to actually DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS as opposed to chin-stroking about it all day long. (Or indeed, as it turned out, chin-stroking about it for years to come.)

If anybody feels the same way, e-mail me (gilesb@gmail.com), because I'm totally not kidding. Actions speak louder than words. Less yammering, less yanking our weiners about how futuristic and enlightened we are, and absolutely NO MORE of the boring nitpicky dickwads saying why it won't work for some blah blah blah bullshit "I'll say anything to avoid getting off my ass and helping people" reason.

Fuck all that. Let's teach some kids tech literacy who wouldn't otherwise learn it and change the world already, even if it's just some tiny little piece of the world. Still better than nothing.

what a horrible idea... top-down initiatives to turn young kids onto being over-smart and underpaid.

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