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Within a few years, every single student in the San Francisco Unified School District will be studying computer science, at all grade levels.
The city’s Board of Education unanimously approved the measure during its weekly meeting on Tuesday evening.
"Information technology is now the fastest growing job sector in San Francisco, but too few students currently have access to learn the Computer Science skills that are crucial for such careers," Board President Emily Murase said in a statement on Wednesday. "We are proud to be at the forefront of creating a curriculum that will build on the knowledge and skills students will need starting as early as preschool."
According to the district, computer science classes are relatively rare across the United States.
"Currently, no national, state, or local standards exist for Computer Science and the academic research in Computer Science education is quite limited," the board wrote. "As such, a cohesive progression of Computer Science knowledge and skills does not yet exist."
It's the year 2015. Why isn't CompSci a mandatory part of the curriculum everywhere in America? It was at my gymnasium (academic high school) in Germany, and that was 25 years ago.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2015, @09:48AM
Python in rxvt is boring, you unfit parent. Teach your kid JavaScript in Chrome, for Christ's sake. It's a whole visual development environment with a command line and an integrated debugger and instant feedback. Start by pulling apart an Ajax web site, make fun changes to the user interface, do something with immediate gratification. Make a game of learning how something shiny and graphical works under the hood.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2015, @12:58PM
From watching a few classes where kids were having a great time learning Logo (long ago...), I'd say to teach your kids Scratch.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday June 14 2015, @04:12PM
I feel like Python has a much simpler syntax than ECMAScript. If I were teaching a child a first language, I'd pick Python over ECMAScript any day.
If you have the cash - and if you have cash for anything, it should be teaching your kids - littleBits and legos seem like a really awesome combination. [littlebits.cc] If I had kids (which I thankfully don't), I would get them some littleBits early. Like, right after they made the transition from duplos to legos. Then when their reading and writing is at a decent level, try to get them interested in a problem that is too complicated for their littleBits to solve.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 15 2015, @07:31PM
Maybe it's just because my first languages were all C variants (unless you could BASIC...) but I would *never* start someone with Python -- or any other whitespace sensitive language. You switch text editors and suddenly you have to reformat your entire program or the damn thing won't run anymore. You get two lines that *look* identical, but one works and the other causes the damn thing to crash. Javascript, as bad as it is, is far more sane.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday June 15 2015, @10:08PM
ECMAScript is whitespace sensitive, albeit not as much as python. It automatically inserts semicolons when you have a line break, if it feels that you needed one.
So
var saySomething = function (something) {
return console.log(something);
};
saySomething('foo');
will log 'foo' to the console, but
var saySomething = function (something) {
return
console.log(something);
};
saySomething('bar');
will be run as if return had a semicolon after it, and the ECMAScript interpreter will never evaluate the line below it. Nothing ever gets logged to the console.
I don't know of any horizontal whitespace issues with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2015, @11:59PM
Jesus, no. Don't start them off with these toy languages that will simply teach them bad habits. Start off with something like C and assembly, so they can get a better idea of what happens in the background. The people who don't get it aren't cut out to do anything anyway.