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I agree with 1. My wife and I just re-watched "Hoop Dreams", which she had never seen. There is a moment where Arthur Agee goes on a recruiting visit to a 2 year college, and is shown offering 4 different generic career ideas to 4 different adults in quick succession. ("Architect", "Business", "Communications", etc). Its like he is guessing at what a career might be, he doesn't have a frame of reference. So, I think the lack of awareness in underprivileged environments may apply to high level career paths in general, not just SD.

Regarding 2, I also agree. I think right now, the school (and possibly home) environments are so sub-optimal that we really have no idea what most underprivileged kids are capable of. But that problem is vastly larger and more intractable than the "could we teach kids pragmatic SD skills" problem.

As much as I want to believe that some kind of pragmatic software development curriculum could offer a scalable career direction for some of these kids, its not clear to me that it would really solve either of these problems. So, I continue to think about it occasionally, but not pursue it.

Also, I once tried calling underprivileged schools in my city (St. Louis), asking about opportunities to tutor kids in CS/computers. In each case, I got blown off, or referred to the city-wide magnet school, which teaches a tiny fraction of the most gifted students, many of them from the county.




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