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Comment by pw | Hacker News Reader

Ha! Former Wyomingite here. The key person mentioned in this article--State Superintendent Jillian Balow--was my junior high English teacher. I can safely, and, sadly, assure you these folks have no idea what they're doing. In recent years, Wyoming has made a habit of cargo-culting tech trends and this is just the latest. It will invariably be a boondoggle like all the rest.

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> I can safely, and, sadly, assure ...

why don't you go on and do it then with a good argument. No need to go all out, a glimpse of an argument would help, otherwise mentioning a person from what, 10 to 20 years ago is simply ad-hominem. There is no doubt that cs education is more than a fad.

All it really takes is awareness. There's a lot of untapped talent in these states where for most most kids CS isn't even on the map as a career path, where I'm from smart kids get told to be doctors or lawyers. I didn't start coding until I was in college and went from nothing to full stack development with some machine learning skills in 12 months through self-teaching. I wish I'd had something like this when I was younger. Even if the implementation is awful some kids will take to it like a sponge and continue learning on their own.

I totally agree with what you said. I'm really quite sad how late I got into programming (at 14) by basically some random occurrence. Yeah, at the moment I'm ahead of my peers by significant amounts, but I know I could have done\would be doing a lot more, a lot more efficiently if I had had any formal education from the start on related topics, lessons that start with the sentence "Today we're learning how to use Microsoft Word" don't really count.

Just because someone was an English teacher doesn't mean they can't design an effective program to teach a different discipline. If you think it's because she was a bad teacher, maybe she was a bad teacher and a good administrator.

It's just a matter of marshaling the right talent to build the right parts of it.

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