[scottrb]

If the US were to integrate coding into the school curriculum, our K-12 schools could rise to the global ranks that our university system currently occupies. But it can't just be an addon elective, it needs to be integrated across many subjects. So much of learning that's considered to be dull or boring can be made fun with programming. Write a program to simulate a ball flying through the air and aside from giving students the building blocks to make their own games/animations, they've also learned about gravity, projectile motion, and maybe even calculus. Add some wind into the mix to learn about resistance. Write a simple program that simulates cells dividing and you've got some biology and math happening. Creating some basic tones and sounds with code is a frighteningly tiny distance away from learning about music theory.

The software platform could be open sourced. Maybe even written in the programming language that students work in so students could modify it and submit patches, but also to mess with their little minds and get them thinking about self-hosting compilers.

And how much would this cost if done correctly? It's probably a terribly small figure per student over the course of their education. It may even save some money on textbooks if it's a tablet device to double as an e-reader. Maybe even more if those textbooks were open sourced and not sold at laughable prices... It's amazing how far we are behind at present.

My fear is that people assume (good or bad) that every student will come out a programmer, which is just missing the point. EE/CS degrees would be worth even more in such a world.

[gizmo686]

Your examples of dull and boring subjects seems like a list of interesting and exiting projects.

Newtonian physics (generalized from projectile motion): Using with these 3 obvious facts (maybe a historic tangent on how they are not obvious), we construct new rules that describe the way things work. Don't believe the results? You agree with these 3 assumptions right? Is their any flaw in your work? Then your result is correct, is their a way we can go about testing it?

Good job working with Newtonian physics. Now, say that their is wind blowing 5 mph east, how does this effect our results? Well, the coefisiant of wind resistence for sufficiently slow speeds are _. Wait, we already know how to do this, this is just another force, moving on...

If you take a code first approach, you routinely miss the good stuff.

[dinkumthinkum]

Why are Javascript CRUD apps more interesting than learning how the world we actually live in actually works? I don't know, seems subjective to me.

Most of this "math is too boring for anyone to want to learn" stuff is a cultural issue anyway. It also might be a mass education issue. Either way, programming is not some special snowflake subject to solve such issues.