[lunias]

I think that's reasonable. I really wish they offered more applicable classes at lower levels of education... I did like 2 days of programmable Legos in 5th(?) grade and then had to take a basic typing / MS Office course in 9th grade (required like you). In 11th grade I took CISCO Networking, Computer Manufacturing, and an intro programming course in C++.

After high school, I did a 4 year degree in Computer Science and while I learned a lot about algorithms, proofs, FSMs, design-patterns, etc. We got very little practical experience building software.

It'd be nice if they covered version control, more *nix and text editors, extending an existing codebase, refactoring, debugging, APIs, common libraries, multiple languages, and the web in general.

I think most CS students learn to become software engineers either on the job or on their own and there's room for school to help ease that transition.