Should Everyone Learn Code?
Should everyone—including children—know how to program a computer? Check out this Wired article by Klint Finley:
“Carlos Bueno wants your 5-year-old to think like a programmer.
By day, Bueno is a Facebook engineer. He helps hone software on the servers underpinning the world’s largest social network. But he moonlights as a children’s author. His first book is called Lauren Ipsum, and it’s a fairy tale that seeks to introduce children — as young as five or as old as 12 — to the concepts of computer science.
But this isn’t done with code. It’s done with metaphors. In one scene, the titular character, Laurie Ipsum, teaches a mechanical turtle to draw a perfect circle using simple instructions in the form of a poem. ‘I wanted to write a book not on how to program, but how to think like a programmer,’ Bueno tells Wired.
The book was illustrated by his wife, Ytaelena Lopez, and the two self-published after raising funds on Kickstarter. Bueno — who ‘tested’ the book on his nephews as he wrote it — says that programming should be a part of everyone’s education. ‘The first step to controlling your life in the modern world is understanding computers,’ he says.
Lauren Ipsum is part of a much larger movement that seeks to bring programming skills to, well, everyone. At MIT, researchers have built a programming platform called Scratch that targets children as young as eight years old, and this gave rise to a Google-funded platform called App Inventor that applies many of the same tools to the development of Android applications.
Meanwhile, a startup called Codecademy is now offering programming lessons over the web in an effort to turn the everyman into a programmer, and in January, when it announced a crash course called ‘Code Year,’ over 445,985 people pledged to learn to code in 2012, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Not everyone is keen on the idea. Just last week, Jeff Atwood, the CTO and co-founder of the question-and-answer site StackExchange, lambasted the code literacy movement with a blog post entitled ‘Please Don’t Learn Code.’
‘If the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York,’ he wrote. ‘I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing.’
But Carlos Bueno believes this sells programming well short. ‘Programming is a broadly applicable life skill,’ he says. ‘Even if you’re not in front of a computer, you can use programming skills for problem solving.’ Lauren Ipsum doesn’t include any computer code, but it does seek to instill the ideas behind computer programming.
Mark Surman, the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, says that although some children may not be suited to computer science, we should at least expose them to it. ‘If we want kids to be makers rather than consumers (our goal), this is a critical age,’ he says.” Read more here.
As for me, I can’t imagine why I would learn code. But I kind of think my kids should. How about you?
I think learning the basics, being introduced to the concept of coding should be introduced, just as Carlos Bueno is doing through his book. As someone who is just starting to learn how to code, I find it’s an interesting language, clear and concise, that has helped me with my own communication skills. I think of coding to be be more of a supplementary skill to help build knowledge, rather than a necessary one that people will need to perform in adulthood as part of their jobs and professions.
How do we teach supplementary skills that are but a few decades old, are such literacies different from writing which most have only started to learn in the last few centuries. What makes any skill vital – I don’t know
This has been on my mind ever since the Marissa Mayer/Yahoo media frenzy. Learning code is not only useful it can also open a child’s mind to so many creative applications in art, math, and discoveries in cyber space. But the child should be taught code only if her or she shows interest. It shouldn’t be something the child feels is forced or like school homework.
In college, I worked in the computer center for three years. Finally took a comp sci course and almost failed it.
I was way too young. In the late 90′s, my late 40′s, I taught myself js. I’m now working (very, very slowly) on php. I don’t make things with this knowledge so much as understand why things aren’t happening the way I expect/the way they promise to.