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Appalbarry [soylentnews.org] writes:

Ever one to jump on a bandwagon, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark has declared that [vancouversun.com] computer-coding basics will be included in British Columbia's grade-school curriculum. The new program announced today will be available for Grades 6 to 9 and will take three years to roll out.

But is this really a sensible use of increasingly limited education funding? Does making beginner coding a mandated subject really increase or improve the number of adults creating software? Does cobbling together simple programs make people more tech literate in a meaningful way?

And is Christy jumping in just in time for the current tech bubble to burst?

Some of us old codgers recall the heady days of the first Internet bubble, when every university ramped up tech training, and every city spent millions of dollars to build high-tech campuses. Only a few years later the former were turning out hundreds of unemployable graduates, and the latter were on the block for pennies on the dollar after tech bankruptcies. [www.cbc.ca]

Still, Christy does have the technical chops to argue for this kind of training - she, for example, was totally unaware that her own staff used to delete, double-delete, and even triple-delete embarrassing email on government servers. [www.cbc.ca]

(Note: every news story seems to have the details differently, and there's nothing on the government web sites, so we'll have to take Christy at her word on this one. Although it would have been nice if she told us who was going to teach millions of kids coding, since 95% of teachers would know nothing about the field.)

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