{"id":2113,"date":"2012-04-02T09:55:37","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T15:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2014-09-12T11:56:55","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T17:56:55","slug":"it-turns-out-that-learning-about-computing-is-not-like-learning-to-drive-a-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/2012\/04\/02\/it-turns-out-that-learning-about-computing-is-not-like-learning-to-drive-a-car\/","title":{"rendered":"It Turns Out that Learning About Computing is NOT like Learning to Drive a Car"},"content":{"rendered":"Approximate Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

Why all our kids should be taught how to code: m.guardian.co.uk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m just sayin’ ……<\/p>\n

almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating<\/em> children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training<\/em> them to use obsolescent software products.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is true in Canada too. Once again, Teacher Ed programs have gotten it wrong. Unfortunately, most Educational Technologists can’t help… they don’t know any more either.<\/em><\/strong> True, they may be encouraging their pre-service teachers to mess around with the “latest and greatest”, but unless they actually know something about how those apps work, they aren’t doing any more than training drivers.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children.<\/p>\n

….<\/p>\n

There will be lots of interesting discussions about the key concepts that students will need to understand, but here’s one possible list for starters. Kids need to know about: algorithms (the mathematical recipes that make up programs); cryptography (how confidential information is protected on the net); machine intelligence (how services such as YouTube, NetFlix, Google and Amazon predict your preferences); computational biology (how the genetic code works); search (how we find needles in a billion haystacks); recursion (a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem); and heuristics (experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I ESPECIALLY like this last paragraph:<\/p>\n

The biggest justification for change is not economic but moral. It is that if we don’t act now we will be short-changing our children. They live in a world that is shaped by physics, chemistry, biology and history, and so we \u2013 rightly \u2013 want them to understand these things. But their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don’t have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like. We will, in effect, be breeding generations of hamsters for the glittering wheels of cages built by Mark Zuckerberg and his kind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n