At the previous school I worked at I taught AP Programming using C++ and Java. My last year there in 2007 I became aware of Scratch. I thought this was a programming language that would be accessible for all students allowing many more to learn about program. So when I moved to Ho Chi Minh City and my current school I made Scratch programming part of what every student grade 6-10 learnt.
“Coding is today’s language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead consumers of computer science.“ Maria Klawe President, Harvey Mudd College
With programming or coding students need to think, analyze, debug and experiment. I think it is something all students should be exposed to. Two days ago I came across an article on the Verge that linked to this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIu9yen5nc
In addition to the variety of interesting quotes from all sorts of people I was particularly struck by three things:
- that there is an expectation that there will be a large number of jobs for people able to code
- one out of ten schools teach coding
- nine out of ten schools do not teach coding (sad to see us slipping into this majority)
Some more statistics from code.org.
