Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

Every student should have, at least, exposure to coding and the opportunity to learn it. This has not been the case in my lifetime.

In middle school, a special instructor was brought in to teach programming to the GATE kids. She decided she could only handle one student. So out of the entire class, only one kid was exposed to programming in school

When it was time to enter high school, there were two public schools in the area. One had an AP Computer Science class, but the student body was notorious for its high rates of drug abuse. My parents stuck me in the other, which offered no programming classes at all.

In college, I applied to be a CS major, but I was required to choose a second major since CS was impacted. The school admitted me into my second choice of major. Despite pleading my case with the CS department and arguing with the provost after I enrolled, I was unable to switch into the CS major or take CS classes.

I don't mean to whine. I'm sure I had it a lot better than many self-taught programmers. And maybe if I fought harder, I would have gotten in. But the education system did me no favors in learning CS.

And when I see politicians and Silicon Valley billionaire executives lamenting the lack of skilled programmers in the U.S. while doing nothing effective to fix the problem, I have to roll my eyes.

My experience was that by the time I found someone that actually taught something "computer", I already knew more than they did. This was the rule until I was about halfway through college.

I had the same experience. While that's undoubtedly a credit to our tremendous intellects, it also supports the idea that education in "computers" needs to be rethought.

We've been teaching kids math, writing, reading, etc., for centuries (and we still struggle with it). But coding is relatively new, and our educational system doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

Sorry, I don't intend to cast aspersions on your upbringing, but why does class availability matter at all to this discussion? Myself, and everyone in the small group of middle school kids at my school who were interested, learned programming from books. Our school was extraordinarily poor, so the whole notion of CS classes was laughable.

I remember trying that when I was in middle school and discovering that the local library did not exactly have a great selection, and I didn't know anyone who could recommend good resources. Searching the web kept bringing up the same few overly shallow tutorials which didn't even explain how to actually run a program. It's less of an issue today, but finding good resources to learn from matters.

Our library was also mostly useless. Maybe it's opportunity cost, then. We lived a ~5 hour drive away from anything resembling a city, so purchases of anything other than food were very infrequent. This allowed us to save up until the next trip to purchase a few C++ or Pascal( yeah I know )books from Bookman's and a cheap (student edition can be had when you're 10 years old without a student id) copy of turbo c++. That would last a year of learning. The next year, perhaps a VESA graphics book, etc.

> why does class availability matter at all to this discussion?

It matters because that's exactly what this discussion is about: making coding/programming part of our educational system.

It's about teaching kids programming in schools, and providing them with the same time, resources, and instruction they get to learn cursive or algebra or home economics or English.

Of course, we could always get rid of those subjects too, and expect the kids who are interested to learn them from books in their free time.

Also, not to cast aspersions on your upbringing, but how were you introduced to programming? Did you have a computer in the house or at a friend's house? Or did you just imagine sitting at a computer, and imagine typing commands into a computer, and imagine the results? Perhaps home computers are commonplace now, but it wasn't always the case. And it's not always the case in poor households. Is it likely that children from poor families and attending poor schools would have the same exposure to programming that you enjoyed?

Exposure and opportunity are the keys. Not everyone should learn to code, but everyone should be exposed to programming and given the chance to pursue it. Replace the year I spent learning cursive with a programming intro.

I'm the opposite. Judging from my whiteboard handwriting, I wish I spent more time learning cursive.

Most programming classes that do exist also aren't available until high school. This is a mistake. Elementary school kids are totally capable of learning the basics (I was using HyperCard when I was 6), and they have a key advantage: they don't feel much shame from making mistakes. Kids get frustrated and distracted, but not embarrassed.

This is a major problem for adults learning to use computers in general, and for programming in particular. If you're afraid of poking at a system and possibly breaking it, it's very difficult to learn how it works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com