[dizzystar]

I'm not feeling good about the trend of teaching everyone how to program. There are other skills that are equally as viable, if not more so, and there are a ton of people who wouldn't be able to cut it, anyways.

Grant it, we all have our weaknesses (I have terrible rote-style memory so I did terrible in History), but I don't think that purposefully pushing kids into classes were there is a chance over 50% can't get a grip on it is a good idea. As an elective course, it is great, but should be no more mandatory than a foreign language or requiring people to master pre-calculus before graduating. I mean, with programming being so mathematical, why would you mandate students to program when so many struggle to get past algebra in high school?

[jiggy2011]

When I went to school (in the UK) both learning at least 1 foreign language and basic precalc stuff were compulsary part of the education at GCSE (age 16) level.

I would be extremely sceptical of the claim that 50% of people cannot learn programming as much as I would be sceptical of the claim that the same number of people would be incapable of learning written english or basic algebra. This is assuming that there is good quality instruction available (this is of course the hard part in reality).

Bear in mind we are probably talking about very simple stuff here like for loops , simple algorithms like bubblesort and maybe some javascript animations or whatever.

How to architect large OO systems, how to handle concurrency etc are probably not topics that need to be covered here at all. Students who want to study to be professional programmers will likely do extracurricular learning or take further courses.

I taught myself to do simple program at ~age 10 and please believe me when I say that I was in no way a gifted child. Not only this but I successfully taught some of my friends how to program and they didn't seem to struggle too much.

Programming can also bring new dimensions to other classes, for example it helped me check answers in math, made algebra much more intuitive and I even submitted a text adventure in place of a linear story in a creative writing class.

[Total_Meltdown]

I don't agree with your implication that finding math easy is somehow a prerequisite for high school programming classes. I found that most of my struggle in mathematics came from lack of any kind of practical application for it. By contrast, I saw programming as building something, which is directly in line with my own sense of fun. I could just as easily have been an engineer or carpenter, it's just computers that I got my hands on first. I would say it's because of this that mathematics are much easier to me when I can apply it somehow to relevant problems that I'm facing in programming.

So I argue that programming courses may actually be a good way to boost the really important stuff - literacy and mathematics. (I think everyone here would agree that literacy is an important part of being a good developer.) It's a real, practical, exciting application of these more abstract ideas.

[peter_l_downs]

Nailed it. Also worth mentioning that maybe being forced to take a class isn't a good way to learn something. I learned to love to program by playing with it as a hobby. I hated the programming class I took as an elective in highschool because the content was outdated and the teacher was pretty terrible. Another good question: who would be teaching these classes?