We're going back to coding school with Nostalgia Bytes this week! Don't forget your TI calculators, Trapper Keepers, Lisa Frank folders, and USB drives. Each decade has its own story to tell. So get ready to relive the past and share your nostalgic memories with fellow developers!
🏫 Imagine a school where coding was a mandatory subject. How would that have changed your learning experience?
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Top comments (20)
In my school we programmed super-boring stuff with turbo pascal in the most non-intuitive way ever.
Trust me, even the computer nerds were demotivated by all this. I just can imagine how all the non-tech persons would have been even more scared off by all this and many career choices would have ended up very different IMO.
However, there were also fun parts, like a good friend finding out that
net send *was not blocked and he sent a friendlymooto all machines in the school network.... 🙈I am pro digital education but to me it's more important for "the masses" to learn about privacy, data sovereignty, how the web works (and how it not works), implications of releasing any information on the web or why mobile phones are basically mobile wiretaps....
Yeah... net send
Prior to this Microsoft based command of message sending, there was a similar command on Novel Netware OS, but I don't remember the exact command.
If coding was mandatory, it may have shortened the time it took me to figure out what I wanted to do as an adult or it could have turned me off completely. I was always told I was bad at math as a youth. However, that ended up being my college major. The thing is, when I got to college I had more freedom to explore the things I liked. Of course, I never had performance problems when it came to other subjects. I think the make or break thing for a coding course would be taking an approach similar to the arts rather than math. I took computer classes when I was younger, and they were interesting but ultimately didn't really capture the imagination. Art was always great though because art classes involved looking at completed works and learning how to do something similar. Rote memorization and thoughtless reproduction kill inspiration and should not be widely used in academia, yet those techniques form the backbone of teaching styles for STEM in pre-college levels.
Where I go to school, they teach us basically the same thing year after year. (Like, here's how to move a shape around!) So in grade twelve, what we'd be learning would be
console.log('Hello, World!'). Because that's how my school system works :/The school system is soooo outdated and inefficient. And it's been like that for years already.
Unfortunately :(
😔
When I was in college, the first class of "introduction to programming" was mandatory for everyone regardless of their major.
Granted, it wasn't really coding. It was getting people fiddling around with Visual Basic for anyone that was not studying computer science.
Growing up, I viewed the world mostly through an entrepreneurial scope so I tended to care about things that impacted my life and the people around me. The way STEM was taught made me think my brain was not meant for such things 😝
But I was super lucky to have had a computer at a really young age, and I fell head over heels with all the cool stuff I could do. I pushed that thing to its limit lol
I'm 35 today, and I have the same warm feeling now with science and engineering, but it took at a decade of massive self-doubt to get there.
Had I started early, I think I would've been Tony Stark by now.
I think if you do, teach it in a way that will be useful to people, and teach it to exercise general algorithmic thinking skills or encourage automation mindsets.
I first started coding programs on my school calculator to automate formulas and
cheatgo faster on tests. Actually, I probably learned all that math stuff better because of that.Given how test-centric and stressful our education processes can sometimes be, I would oppose this.
Programming requires a significant amount of focus, determination, and perseverance, just like any other skill. If someone doesn’t want these skills, they will never develop them, and that should be fine.
Also, programming is not just one skill. You can teach someone to program with code, but that still doesn’t teach them how to decompose a problem, debug, maintain, etc.
I teach as a component of my job, and the one thing I will never be able to teach is how to care about something you don’t care about.
There are a lot of programmers on the ADHD/Autism spectrum.
These types of people sometimes do very poorly in school due to the structure of learning. I'm bad at math. Growing up, CS was all about math. As a result I started very late. Speaking purely for myself, (also as someone who predates Google), mandatory programming classes would have likely turned me off programming by a lot.
Or maybe I'd have designed a quantum computer by now. Who knows.
My point is, forcing someone to learn something rarely goes well and can be very gatekeeper'y
My learning experience wouldn't have changed as I took my own initiative outside of school and elected to take the classes where programming opportunities existed.
Should programming be a mandatory subject? I would say yes in today's society, while we do need professions outside of software engineering, supplemental programming opportunities are only increasing outside of the primary career field. Mandatory programming course may not involve large or complex designs or patterns, but at a minimum provide students with a base understanding for something as simple as a macro in excel would enable a lot of people to be more effective with their careers.
If coding was a mandatory subject, I guess I would've showed up more.
Oddly enough, in high school (~2002), I would get in trouble for "skipping school", but in reality I was in the computer lab. Didn't want to be anywhere else. To me, nothing else really mattered.
I think I would have probably caught up real quick. because there is so many rabbit holes. I am looking at installing XAMPP to try out my PHP and now I have discovered Perl and now it interests me because I see one can use it with JavaScript.
There is so many things to learn and so many things to do. it takes some time to be confident at a comfortable level.
This is one of the most interesting and challenging things i have ever gotten into. I do not know why i took so long to get into it.
Maybe its the entrance barrier and people who talk crap about needing math to learn coding. it turns many people off. and then it does looking confusing and complex at a glance.
So if it were introduced at school. I would have probably started a long time ago.
But then its never too late.
I think my learning experience would have been easier. I think my brains was more plastic then. I rarely was tired. right now i do 6 hours and I can feel it. 8 to 10 hours learning is a lot. Working maybe not so much. I have to take a break a nap maybe a sleep. When I wake up early in the morning I am the best. and the it just goes down lol.
So it probably a decent idea, I would have definitely failed the class. I was petrified of computers when I was a kid. Also since I am old, most people did not have a home computer(desktop or laptop) yet. I guess it would help if each semester in High School had a computer class from learning basic use to electives like a coding class or a cloud class. I do think it would have to have an extra class per week or class cycle for Lab like other sciences. Also giving homework might be difficult cause I do not think all have computers in the home or high speed internet. I believe the class would have to be worked on only in class and the lab.
Coding classes encourage to be more creative, help harnessing curiosity to solve problems and brings structure with problem solving... coding would have helped me to be more better in developing critical thinking skills that extend far beyond the realm of coding itself.
Not at all. I started teaching myself at age 7 (in 1983). By the time we had any kind of programming lessons in school (probably about 8 years later) - my skills were already better than the teacher's, and I was correcting his mistakes.
The problem with lessons is that the teachers (and the course material) very often are not particularly good. A decent reference book, and a curious mind will often get you MUCH further, faster.
If coding class was mandatory, people at my high-school would actually know what I'm talking about.