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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Latest comments (20)
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.
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
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.
If coding class was mandatory, people at my high-school would actually know what I'm talking about.
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'm sure a lot ov people in my school would flunk.
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 :(
😔
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.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.