[ChuckNorris89]

And also Eastern European or ex-USSR countries where highschool STEM curriculum is more difficult than in the west and participation in STEM competitions and olympiads is encouraged for kids.

We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.

[BeetleB]

> We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams

This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

> study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS

That's more like it!

[ChuckNorris89]

>This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?

It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.

[BeetleB]

I wouldn't call 11 years old as "high school".

[Tade0]

Eastern European here. From the mentioned I had binary division, but that was it.

I was solving leetcode-adjacent problems for the entire last year of high school in preparation for the final exam though.

[foobarian]

This was poked fun at in ex-YU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmrJQaj8sIo&t=240s (sorry, no translation; tl;dr: CS without computers)