My teacher managed to get our entire school of over 3,200 kids to take an intro CS class that used Racket and NetLogo. I still think that's the most insane, brilliant accomplishment. He managed to get everybody in this school to learn Lisp. Of course a lot of people found it awful and boring and confusing, but it's still a mad genius accomplishment.
I'm skeptical of teaching CS to kids because I'm not sure we know how to teach it to college students. As far as I can tell, we have a strict divide between people who can write code and people who can breathe code. And the people who breathe code rarely, if ever, learn from their courses as much as from themselves.
I suppose exposing more kids earlier will get them to start teaching themselves, but perhaps we can do it outside of a classroom format. I'm imagining a more free system where kids can explore a variety of activities, some of which are programming influenced. Like a set chunk of computer time with some programming options, some writing options, some film options, etc. Digital Montessori, so to speak.
I'm skeptical of teaching CS to kids because I'm not sure we know how to teach it to college students. As far as I can tell, we have a strict divide between people who can write code and people who can breathe code. And the people who breathe code rarely, if ever, learn from their courses as much as from themselves.
I suppose exposing more kids earlier will get them to start teaching themselves, but perhaps we can do it outside of a classroom format. I'm imagining a more free system where kids can explore a variety of activities, some of which are programming influenced. Like a set chunk of computer time with some programming options, some writing options, some film options, etc. Digital Montessori, so to speak.