Computer Science (education)

[arissa]

See America is slacking and it is not just in exploring like I mentioned before. I had a chance to get into classes like this but I never took them, I ended up dropping out of college before the first semester started (family emergancy). Some of the classes they are teaching kids now are okay but for the most part I still see many people (of all ages) learning this on their own, similar to most of my "geek" friends. How many here took classes for it?

[Buffy]

Yep, Computer Science is back, although not yet at the K-12 level. There was a time when that was popular, but the drastic cuts to school budgets here in the USA, CS was one of the first to go. Conversely, in Vietnam, all school age kids are required to learn to program (sadly the original blog post on this is no longer available).

 

A great deal of this is pure startup activity around mobile apps, but hopefully the big companies will continue to expand their understanding of how much waste goes on shipping programming jobs off-shore or insisting that they have to be able to pay below-market wages and therefore need copious numbers of H1-B visas.

 

The fact is you can learn a lot on your own, but as someone who hires developers I can tell you that decent CS programs that teach the fundamentals and theory produce programmers who are far more valuable than those that just teach brute-force programming (which by the way is typical in India and China, although Russia and Israel tend to teach CS the "right way").

 

So, if you want to go into programming, find a decent 4-year program, and you'll go a lot farther and make more money.

 

 

If a man empties his purse into his head no one can take it away from him, :phones:

Buffy

[Racoon]

If people want to live their life looking at a computer screen the rest of their life...

 

 

But fail to realize that they need simple Farmers to grow the food they need to live ??

[CraigD]

Buffy, on 18 Jun 2014 - 6:19 PM, said:

Conversely, in Vietnam, all school age kids are required to learn to program (sadly the original blog post on this is no longer available).

The missing blog page in the Register article is available here via archive.org. :)

 

It’s a wonderful blog article, though I’m skeptical of Neil Fraser’s claim that most of a Vietnamese 3rd grade class wrote a successful Pascal program to solve a maze-tracing problem given only a natural language description of the problem and an ascii file representing a given maze. In the WV public college system in the 1970s, similar problems (and Pascal) were used in our yearly intermural programming contests, in which 4 college undergraduates were given 4 hours to complete 4 problems. Only about half of the team successfully completed all 4 problems.