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posted by martyb on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the Free-As-In-Friday-Afternoon-Discussion dept.

Last week, President Trump signed a memorandum for $200M per year in federal funding to advance K-12 computer science education.

A good initiative, says IEEE, but, for just this once, let's not spend this money on yet again a bunch of 3D-printers, laptops or educational robots.

Ideal CS courses should teach computational thinking: logical thinking, abstraction, algorithmic expression, problem decomposition, stepwise fault isolation, and debugging. Hardware ain't helping there. Good, qualified, teachers do. But how do you get (good) CS graduates in front of the classroom when they can easy make a multitude writing software, or doing network engineering?

Companies like Microsoft already have programs that encourage volunteer employees to spend a couple of hours each week, teaching classes at high schools. An even better idea, IEEE claims, would be if those employees spent several days at the school, teaching students, while also mentoring teachers.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:56AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:56AM (#578447)

    You can do a lot in the world with $200 million worth of resource allocation power! It's insane to say otherwise.

    I'd give the RISC-V projects a hell of a kick in the ass with that kind of money, and still have enough left over to say "Fuck You" to anybody's face; yet, that money is instead going to go into teaching "urban" kids how to make Excel produce a pie graph.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @11:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @11:04AM (#578540)

    That's what I figure too.

    Instead, teach them how to get the same result and give an Economics lesson at the same time:
    You can do it with a box that's at least 10 years old and software that costs $0. [google.com]

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]