

On the “Learn to Code” Movement and Its Lies - rayj
https://medium.com/p/1982aab8aa8e

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rf1331
Computer Science alongside other subjects is a hell of a lot more impactful
than most liberal arts classes. I rarely meet non-engineers (or people with
some sort of technical training) who know how to think analytically worth a
damn. Introducing CS would certainly help this.

And this argument is basically decrying the semantics of "Learn to code". Yes,
the term is ambiguous. That's not the point. I believe it's called using
layman's terms.

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kellishaver
My husband and I have teamed up to teach our daughter (11) how to program, and
while it may put us in the "bad parent" category in some people's eyes,
learning to program is not optional. Fortunately, she seems to be interested
and enjoying herself.

There are a whole host of valuable skills that learning to program teaches
you; critical thinking and analytical skills, problem solving and planning,
organizational skills, collaborative skills, reading comprehension and writing
skills (documentation).

These are all extremely important skills to have and they all seem to be
severely lacking from her public school education, where the emphasis is on
teaching to the test and following a less than ideal Common Core curriculum.
Going to school isn't actually teaching her _how_ to think to any serious
degree.

It's teaching her how to intuit answers to standardized questions, certainly a
useful skill to possess, but she also needs to be tackling problems too big to
just "do" so that she can understand the thought processes and develop the
methods to do complex thinking.

Actually being fluent in a programming language and writing a piece of
software is something that I see as a sort of side effect; useful, certainly,
but not the main goal.

Are there other ways to foster this sort of "big picture' thinking? Sure, but
programming is what we know, so it's the vehicle we will use to teach her the
skills we feel she needs to have, but isn't getting.

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robotys
Good in coding is an effect of good and clean analytical thinking on problem
solving. All men in my family are mechanic (13yo the youngest) while i'm a
programmer and it shows that both world use the same problem solving
techniques and some familiar technical mindset.

Good thinking preceeds technical mastery. Mastery in any skill (which is
basically any applied knowledge) can be learnt by apprenticeship for a period
of time.

It takes a jedi to train a padawan.

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gregjor
Good example of why "learn to write" is more important than "learn to code."
Medium desperately needs copy editors.

