Kids to learn how to code before high school in New Zealand
radionz.co.nz
radionz.co.nz
Does everyone need to write code for a living? No, just like we don't expect everyone to be a professional writer or mathematician. But software is so pervasive that within a generation or two, not understanding how it works will put you at a severe disadvantage.
Cause last time I checked a crazy numbers of them lack basic skills after they got out of high-scool. That's is a terrible and grave problem we should try to solve in an emergency before doing anything else fancy.
Stuff that anybody should be able to do WAY before being able to code:
- make the summary of a text
- calculate % of something
- understand correlation is different from causality
- read graphs and maps
- follow instructions in a book to do a simple task
- write a letter explaining directions in a clear way
- being able to demonstrate causality on a simple system they just witness working without using an example in their demonstration
- calculate the cost of buying a car or having a baby when given the proper metrics and projecting on that
Those are stuff our system is supposed to succeed in teaching at a very young age and many adults don't even have such basic skills.
We have a problem here.
Reading is a man made system of information conveyance. To master reading, you master the rules of it, while understanding the intent and purpose. Writing is the same - a man made system of information conveyance, except for creation rather than consumption. It has rules, and you need to understand intent and purpose to master it.
Math is the patternized structural implementation system of the universe. Again, to master math, you learn the rules, and understand the intent and purpose.
Code is a man made system of information conveyance meant to implement math for practical applications. You need to learn the rules and understand the intent.
All of your examples just demonstrate that fundamentally, education starts and ends with the ability of someone to understand a system - to interpret it rules, understand its intent, and use that knowledge for purpose to apply the rules with intent.
That fundamental abstraction is horrifying, because it becomes so obvious that these stills are never acquired. I'd postulate a majority of public school graduates in the US cannot use structured logic to adopt new ideas and structural systems in a consistent way, which belays the fundamentals of what education is meant to accomplish.
More punctual orators call this "learning to learn". It is a lacking subject in almost all educations, something you are meant to hopefully acquire on your own, but the absence of which is worse than any other failure of development. Living without critical thinking is akin to a failure to thrive.
This is what we are supposed to do.
This is not, however, what we do in school.
School is now doing :
- baby sitting
- killing creativity and autonomy
- blending all kids into on uniform bowl
- giving them examples on how to avoid admiting your are wrong, using fear, cheating, power abuse, bad food, fact distorsion, memorizing and forgetting...
- ranking kids against each others according to arbitrary yet not objective metrics
- teaching kids to pass, and fit a disfonctional system, at all cost, or be ashamed
I have been a student to 11 schools due to my father moving a lot for his work, from the worst in the hood to the best private ones. None of them prepared me for my life. Most of the kids that went in there came out without required basic skills, and yet passed. The most expensive ones are the less evil, so money is an issue.
Nonsense.
However, the fact that this is often considered a valid view shows how little philosophy/ethics are part of common education..
Once someone realizes it is their duty to learn, and that learning is a virtue that is rewarding on its own and brings benefit to themselves and others, the 'skill' is rapidly acquired.
What? I have university-level calculus (up to multi-variable integration etc), and can't think of the last time I needed it for coding.
Teachers, especially here in France it seems have taken to the notion that one teaches better through abstraction and unrelenting positive encouragement. I don't want to be the grumpy old fart, but maybe a stricter enforcement of realistic & basic requirements like those listed in your parent are a good first step.
Let those who want a diploma/certificate work for it and encourage students by all means, but sometimes not good enough is just not good enough and that should be OK for national education to recognise and adapt to.
This is our problem here. When the system fails, it has no way to react in a sane maner. If a kid, 3 years in a row, cannot aquire the skills he/she should, the system then will pass her/him automatically.
Because the current society is claiming being smart is unpopular, kids have no insensitive to apply themself to learning. The new generation of parents doesn't commit to make them to. And teachers are not allowed to. This leads to a very tricky situation.
Not all will go on to become professional coders. Not all will be very good at it, just as some people aren't great at spelling, or basic maths. But this lays the groundwork for logical thinking with a scientific approach to validating assumptions.
Getting this down at an early age, when kids are learning fundamentals like counting and spelling, will give them a really strong foundation for developing advanced thought-based skills later. That is far more important than the specifics of knowing how to code.
It does not work other way round. In my experience, it is precisely the difficulty with breaking tasks into step by step instructions that makes difference between people who have easy time learning it vs hard time learning it.
In other words, you might learn how to code in order that you then know how to give clear instructions.
The real programing would mean teaching them how computer really works or network protocols or html,css,javascript etc -which makes less sense for kids and muddles what was supposed to be lesson in technical details.
Just as reading and writing is part of current ordinary jobs like consultancy or plumbing, in the future everyone will be working so closely with the machines they need basic skills:
- How do various UIs work? This is more of a "power user" type skill but nonetheless it's worth practicing. You'll also need an idea of how things work from the user side to write the UI later on. For example you could learn how iOS and Andriod work by playing around with it, and then having a go at making your own apps.
- How does networking work? Stuff will break, just like your plumbing and bureaucracy. You'll need to know at least how to diagnose why you have no internet connection.
- Superficially, how does a given algorithm work? The kids don't need to know everything about DNNs but they have to have the overview of what image recognition does, so they can form expectations about how they will interact with it.
- Security. There's going to be more and more stories about breaches. Just as we teach them sex ed, they need some basic knowledge about how a password is stored, what encryption is, and so on.
Early age computational thinking is not about using computers, like how to use various operating systems or setting up networks or what is a good password or things like that. When I talk to teachers/school administrators but also other parents they are all excited and give these things as examples of how the curriculum (at my kids' school) could be extended. I think this is because to them, that's 'advanced computing' so that's what children need to know. As to you - I presume since you're here that you work as a programmer, so in that sense you're kind of throwing off my theory...
Either way, what is being done in this sort of programs, is teach elementary thinking skills. For many, you don't even need a computer. It's about the concept of breaking down a task into very small subtasks that you can describe exactly, without ambiguity, and while still covering corner cases. That is 'computational thinking', and it's so far removed from the everyday world of current adults (who are not at least somewhat programmers) that they usually have a very hard time even understanding what it's about. How you configure your internet connection is nothing like that, and such menial skills have no place in elementary school classrooms. There are only so many hours in each day, we need to make optimal use of them.
Teaching these fundamental skills can be done e.g. using robots like Beebot or Cubetto or similar; using simple programming environments like Scratch; or on paper / in real life like getting someone to describe how to sort other children from small to large in a generic way (and having it play out in front of them); or with board games that incorporate elements of it. There's a lot of experimentation being done how to best teach these things, and the things you'd think of as the 'obvious' way is quite often wrong (for example, getting a 5 year old to drive a robot and introducing conditions and iterations is quite easy and can happen in a few hours; but usually they won't be able to generalize that knowledge. So you need to dress it up into something immersive, to 'soak' them into this way of thinking essentially, and not just a trick they know how to do).
I don't think anyone would suggest something they believe to be 'advanced computing' as part of elementary school education. Rather, I think they see these practical skills of interacting with computers and the internet as something useful directly related to their day-to-day lives, so that's why they think they are important.
I do think that everyone who goes through the school system should take away at least some basic understanding of these directly applicable aspects of computing.
And computational thinking? Compare it to mathematics: If I had to sum up mathematical thinking, I'd say that it's all about logical deduction, working your way from assumptions to the conclusion.
But the maths curriculum is not directly focused on teaching that, the topics covered are more like simplified versions of applied maths problems, roughly ordered by decreasing probability of usefulness (most people will find some use for basic arithmetic, but even solving linear equations is quite unlikely). If the kids pick up mathematical thinking along the way, great, and they will have an easy time with the problems, but even those who get through by memorizing formulae will take away something useful.
I think something similar will happen to computational thinking. Although teaching it to everyone is certainly a noble goal, I doubt that everyone will be able to fully generalize what they are taught. Lessons will have to be tangibly applicable for the students, so that even those who can only memorize the specific and not abstract into the general will have learned something useful, even if it is just a "menial" skill.
Examples of such lessons might involve navigating the menu structure of some program, but then this is essentially tree-traversal, so you can talk about different ways to explore all available options, and "breaking down a task into small subtasks" could be practiced by describing how to move through the menu to perform some action and so on. The point being, you can do a lot of stuff that is related to some aspect of computational thinking, but even if the kids don't generalize what they learned, at least they can find specific items in a menu, and maybe even use hotkeys if they aren't doing it on a touchscreen.
I couldn't agree more.
The curriculum for our kids should be based around building the mental machinary that will enable intuitive, creative and analytic problem solving. Learning a specific language, or some specific design pattern / method seems a little backward to me; this knowledge can be layered on top of this way of thinking in later years.
Focus on building the right hardware (brain) before writing the software for it (knowledge).
The thing is most of those things are practical skills that everyone is going to need. And just like when there people who couldn't read, there are now people who don't know what the little X in the top right corner of Excel does. Sure, school should teach you "elementary thinking skills" but a lot of what goes on is just practical.
I also think not having those practical skills is going to demotivate people. How often do kids give up on something because of mundane reasons? If you're comfortable with using the machine, maybe you'll find it easier to persevere through tougher material. Ideally you'll pick up something useful as well as a reasonable idea of what lies down the line.
I am asking because your comment makes impression of someone who already studied it or have experience.
For that reason I think it'd be misguided to lean too heavily on testing their performance — kids learning chess aren't required to reach certain level at the end of the year, the goal is to go through the training itself.
Two ideas come to mind. First, maybe this is because electricity has gone far beyond "pervasive" into "fully invisible". Second, maybe this is because software is inherently more complex and can't be made fully invisible.
Maybe both ideas are actually the same, but playing on different points of their lifecycles - will software become so industrialised and standardised within a century that it will become as invisible as electricity?
Thinking about early car owners, who needed some non-trivial understanding of how it worked just to be able to use it, or how you needed to know some trivial amount of BASIC to do anything at all with the 80's home computers (<3 ZX Spectrum).
If you can automate some portion of your desk job, you're a much more valuable employee.
The same is theoretically true for factory workers and mechanical/electrical engineers, but the barrier to creating your own factory automation is extremely high. And no one is going to let a random factory worker tweak/augment expensive machinery in a novel and untested way.
Whereas an Excel macro or quick Python script for parsing some data and doing some computations or sending some emails is very accessible and totally acceptable in many environments.
I think your second point is the correct one.
Software eats itself as much as it eats anything else. This is the purpose of compilers and high level languages. To someone coding in a high level language, C code, assembly, and the electronic hardware itself are all reduced to invisible infrastructure. (That's the idea anyway, leaky abstractions notwithstanding).
So, I would argue low level software is often already invisible in the sense that it is hidden behind the abstraction of higher level languages or user interfaces. But the definition of "low level" changes as more advanced software is created, so it's forever a moving target.
And some people still die because they used that interface wrongly.
Unfortunately the corporations seem determined to put a stop to that sort of pervasive knowledge, if only for the purpose of controlling and monetising their users. They don't want people to know how easy it is to do things like strip DRM or remove artificial limitations from software. [See Stallman's famous story, or the Cory Doctorow articles on the demise of general-purpose computing.]
And thus most of the "learn to code" efforts I've seen have seemed to focus on some ultra-high-level language, removed from reality and often sandboxed, so that while people do learn the very-high-level concepts of how computers work, they are no less unclear about the functioning of the actual systems they use daily --- or how to use them fully to their advantage. In some ways, they're trying to teach how to write programs without understanding existing ones.
The document said children should be writing programs and understand how computers store information by their final years of primary or intermediate school.
However, this sounds more promising. Especially if they're starting more along the lines of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...
And can speak to even cooler changes happening in NZ classrooms. In Campbell's Bay school they are running their classrooms similar to how scrum teams work. Teachers act as facilitators and the learning is student led. At the start of the week students get to choose their learning outcomes from things that must be done this week and optional subject areas. And the week plays out like a sprint where students plan it out, some like to do the most difficult things first others unwind on a Monday with group activities with friends. There a 4 classes that all share the same space for this, which is broken in a quiet zone, a collaborative zone, the makerspace and a few smaller glass rooms dotted around. Once kids are happy they have completed a learning outcome they just supply their learning evidence to their teacher and it gets ticked off (BAT).
I also got to here about Kauri Flats primary school that uses design thinking and works with local communities on projects as part of their learning.
These big changes are limited to primary school levels for now largely because of the regulatory assessments put in place at a secondary level. But after hearing from representatives of the ministry of education and the NZ Qualifications Authority, there is definitely room for change in the coming years.
Super cool stuff. And a big step towards the kind of skills needed to succeed in today's society.
This is quite a relevant issue for me because I have taught computer programming to primary school students in New Zealand. Teachers need to not only be taught how to program themselves but also how people learn programming. Which concepts are contingent on the understanding of other concepts.
Every programming teacher (myself included) that I have encountered is just someone who knows how to program muddling though best that they can.
I attended a seminar on how numeracy is taught in NZ. They have a lot of information about the order and time it takes for individual concepts to be grasped. Information from similar research on how children learn to program needs to be coalesced into a teaching plan, and teachers need to be taught that plan.
Doing this right will be a tough job. It will require resources. Probably more resources than will be provided.
1.) This is abut children. Their brains are not developped yet and their motivation is flicky. Pedagogy matters a lot.
The whole point is to teach them basic concepts so that they become able to learn more by themselves later on. They won't be taught modern stack, the point is to make them able to learn real stuff later on. A kid that encounters for cycle first time at university has much much harder time then the one that was even causually playing with logo.
2.) Even adults have common sumbling blocks. Having access to other people's experience - which explanation worked and in what order makes learning more effective.
Pedagogy matters for adults too. The best kind of pedagogy is pedagogical content knowledge. That is, how do you plan a lesson around the specific content you're teaching? For example, what metaphors are effective for a given topic? What are the common stumbling blocks? What classroom exercises and demos are the best?
I've taught first year programming for a few years to collage age students. I don't have data, but I'd guess the difference between an effective lesson and an ineffective lesson is somewhere around 3-4x. That is, if I teach a concept (eg, pointers) ineffectively it seems to take about 3-4 times as long for a median student to 'get it' compared to if I teach it well.
Out of a classroom of about 25 people, there will be about 5 students who are going to become great programmers no matter what I do. And about 5 students who I am convinced will never learn to program, or if they do it'll take them about 2-3x as long as everyone else to master the skill. The knowledge that the remaining 15 students walk out of my classroom with is dependant on my skill teaching programming. Practically speaking most of those students actually learn a patchwork of the things I happened to teach effectively plus whatever they learned on their own while doing assignments.
I hope its enough.
Then again, children can learn by themselves when it is all framed as game they are freely exploring - adults learn much less that way.
Then there is a factor of developing brain - your students all have already brains fully developped. So it won't happen that someone does not possess abstract thinking yet, but still may suddenly click 6 month later on.
Basically, adults are more able to overcome obstacles and be independent in learning while children depend on teacher much more - both for motivation and actual content.
This is definitely true, but more general pedagogic stuff is also extremely useful and shouldn't be poo-poo'd! I got much better at teaching after just observing a really great classroom teacher for a while and having another great teacher observe me and comment. A pedagogy crash course also greatly improved my assessment design.
It's like math or programming or anything, really. If you want to be good, watch the greats and -- if you can -- get the greats to watch you and comment.
You need to be able to communicate and express yourself to exist in society and be useful in an organization, but in order to build anything useful with code it usually takes a huge commitment of time and effort, so application developers specialized in writing code are better suited to making things with code than the average person.
A great example is this: yes I could develop my own music streaming service, but I could also just use Spotify.
That being said, we should still make sure people understand how technology works at a high level just because it's so important for modern society. One of the goals of education should be to help people understand the world in which they're born. And analytical skills are important so in the sense that learning to code can develop these skills, it can also be helpful for the average person.
There should be regular class periods where the students must work together and figure out some way to teach the technologically illiterate adult in the room.
Each project could start with the technologically illiterate adult crying and venting about their mortal fear of being replaced by a robot. In one project, the adult would let it slip that they get insecure when the students just go on their own to Wikipedia to find out information. The students must then put together a workshop with lesson plans and demos that teaches the illiterate adult how to apply their esoteric knowledge of the late 18th century textile industry to the relevant Wikipedia articles.
Repeat as necessary. By the time the kids graduate, the teachers should have a decent grounding in digital technology.
In the UK the government said, "make it so" and failed to provide training or resources for the many computing teachers who don't know how to program (which is most of them since the vast majority of UK based computing teachers come from non-computing subjects like business studies).The difference in quality of teaching, expectation of attainment and learning resources is staggering.
I wish NZ well, but I hope they realize that the teachers are fundamental in making this a success. A lack of investment in teacher training or classroom resources will make this dead in the water.
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That's in the UK. The maths teacher was pretty on the ball here, but the main thing is it caught the kids' interest and communicated the concept of programmability.
Scratch for young children, Python later and you've basically got this coding thing introduced.
If I had to have done this at such an early age I would never actively avoided learning electronics or programming. The rest of the ICT course was basically learning Microsoft office and outlook.
She's taking HR at university so should have a job (sacking people) come the robot/AI revolution :-)
I am afraid this will end up a disaster because the teachers themselves do not know how computer science.
this could end up in a situation analogous to Lockharts lament
The difference here is the age, and that it would be compulsory for everyone.
Well, in Russia there is no alternative. Everything, including Informatics\CS is compulsory for everyone :)
Now I'd like to the process nowadays. Because in 90s most kids didn't have a PC at home (I'm pretty sure my class had two kids with a PC including myself), so from the 3rd year we were taught how to use it at all and some games (you know that maze with a mole moving boxes to get out or something like that). Then Logo, Basic and even Internet at some point. But what now? Most kids use iPad better then their parents by the age of 7...
2-4 grades - elective (in some schools) 5-end of school as compulsory for all schools.
>when does it stop being compulsory
It doesn't. Here in Russia we don't have a system where you can chose your subjects, even in high school (university[1] etc). Instead there is an educational programm to follow. Plus some schools provide elective subjects which you can add to you programm (for example second foreign language).
>Are there specialist teachers
Yep, there are. Specialized schools (we have general schools and schools with specializations, for example with deeper math&physics, or biology, or languages) might have several CS teachers (for example one who teachers younger kids simple things and general programming and the other one with algorithmic\math\network bias).
[1] Obviously in university the programm will differ depending on department you are in and other small things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DevelEire/comments/6jsee6/teachers_...
https://www.media.mit.edu/events/papert/
A few comments have already mentioned Logo, which came out of Papert's work.
I teach undergraduate maths in NZ, so I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think the current approach is working, but could definitely be improved.
Our maths classes basically consisted of being handed really old textbooks and then being left to our own devices. The teachers when they did interact with us had no passion for the subject. I recall when someone asked why we were learning quadratic equations the teacher basically told the class he had no clue. I almost left high school with a deep loathing of the subject, and I say almost because I had one teacher in year 12 who was passionate about the subject and taught it well. I would later learn that his background was in a field related to mathematics (electrical engineering), not teaching which was my impression of all the others.
I guess my main point here is that the New Zealand government could be investing in it's education system by hiring people who have a real world background in the subject matter they're teaching. Having that knowledge and passion for a subject made all the difference - at least for me.
I think tertiary lecturers are generally much more passionate.