
Code.org 2016 Annual Report - dsr12
https://code.org/about/2016
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candiodari
Why do all organizations like these have such an incredible focus on how the
parents and the teachers feel ? Then as a distant second priority there seems
to be how the kids feel. Actual evaluation of ability is nowhere in there.

In that way it feels a bit like all the maths initiatives from when I was
young. But while they got lots of attention, they never lead to effective
mathematicians. And these courses have the same problem : they're too refined,
and it's actually preventing my daughters from having a real interest in
programming. The problem is that this means nothing the kids can hope to do is
either useful or impressive (the non-faked kind of impressive).

They write a game ? Cool. Does it match the examples ? Not even close. Can
they play it ? Host it ? Show it widely ? No. Do they, at the end, have any
ability to produce anything ? No.

Two problems: one is that this works on the cloud. The issue with that is
spelled out in the right to read: nothing works without the walled garden, and
that walled garden is specifically designed to draw attention of everyone away
from you, and to prevent you from doing anything even remotely creative for
fear of allowing offensive/"dangerous" material.

Secondly, there is no followup. This increases the number of "intro to
programming" courses available online and offline from 849579287 to 849579288.
That's great and all, how about advanced ones ? Well, there's VERY few of
those. Even just advanced android/ios programming, or C++ for desktop apps, or
... Dozens, at best. Up to date ? Maybe 2. This material is exactly what is
not needed to improve technology knowledge.

This is, quite simply, not going to produce people enthusiastic about what can
be accomplished with technology. It'll produce people happy with an
afternoon's entertainment and basic notions of what a for loop is.

