14 ms·

Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools

415 points by astdb 10y ago

kendallpark 10y ago
It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this will have on their society and industry. I know everyone has their anecdotal opinion as to whether this a good or bad idea, but we really won't know until a decade or so has passed. I'm interested to see whether the gender ratio of programmers will change at all.
- euske 10y ago
  This. I would be very much curious too, whether if this can have a cultural impact. If not, I'd say it's largely uninteresting. Sure they'll make a couple of successful developers, but I'd rather want to live in a society where people have proper understanding/respect to tech jobs than the same old society with a few math/programming prodigies.
- nkozyra 10y ago
  The greatest potential effect is demystifying "programming." Simply writing code is quite a different set of skills from being a developer, but to many people even superficially it's magic.
zygomega 10y ago
I wish 'programming' included teaching our kids how to be proficient users of technology. How to effectively google, how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine, how to secure your privacy are the type of skills I hope are included in this definition. The architectural and process engineering aspects of programming are better left to learn in adulthood.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  > How to effectively google Sounds good > how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine Uhh, even as a developer I barely ever feel I need to do this (and frankly, I do this quite often). Being able to ssh into another machine is extremely low on the list of things to learn before being proficient.
  - ploxiln 10y ago
    maybe. but text mode is pretty fundamental really. It could be powershell or anything I guess, as long as it had files and commands and was both interactive and scriptable
    - wingerlang 10y ago
      From your perspective maybe. My whole family use computers daily, some do it at work as well I guess and I would bet the number of times they have needed to go into a shell would be exactly zero. I doubt they even know about terminals to be honest. Simply not needed.
      - burfog 10y ago
        It doesn't seem needed because you aren't used to what you can do with it. If you were good at it, you'd be horrified at the thought of not having that capability. It's not just about launching programs and moving files around one by one. A decent shell, like bash, is fully programmable. It lets you express yourself in ways that no GUI does, possibly excepting LabView or Scratch.
        wingerlang 10y ago
        I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user). I also think that even if this was taught from the beginning - it'd remain a power user thing. But I agree, I use automation/scripting/bash every day and would be horrified to loose this ability. But I also know other developer who doesn't use it at all.
        Morgawr 10y ago
        >I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user). I agree with you but you couldn't have chosen a worse example. Mass renaming, tagging or formatting of files is one of the most performed operations of an everyday user and is a massive time sink for people who don't know how to programmatically do it. Classification of downloaded music or movies is very common. Same goes for moving files around and renaming folders and mass-moving documents. I remember when I had to re-format around 1000 images for a friend of mine because he wanted a different size + format to create some photo album. Just a couple of imagemagick lines vs him and I manually spending a lot of hours doing it painstakingly picture by picture.
- gruez 10y ago
  >how to secure your privacy Do you think kids still care about privacy? As in, the giving all your life details to google kind, not the public Facebook profile kind.
smaili 10y ago
Anyone have any thoughts as to why they would take the bottom up approach (ie, start with elementary and go up) rather than top down?
- nihonde 10y ago
  Keep in mind that elementary school kids in Japan also attend evening "cram" schools, where they drill on the subjects on the curriculum. I wouldn't be surprised if the real learning happens at Kumon, etc. By the time they're in high school, it seems like it's all about passing tests and getting into college, but I never went to Japanese school, so my perspective could be totally wrong.
- pcurve 10y ago
  what do you mean top down?
  - 58028641 10y ago
    Top down = start with high school
  - flamedoge 10y ago
    preorder
- hanniabu 10y ago
  Because it's useful to know. If you wait until college to learn it then you miss out on years of use. Having kids get experience with it early on opens their options too. It makes it a less daunting career option. I wish I had exposure earlier on. If I did then I definitely would have gone for CS rather than mechanical engineering.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- proyb2 10y ago
  It would be idea to start in secondary/high school as in educations in Singapore does.
deciplex 10y ago
Maybe they should also find something for those programmers to do as well, while they're at it. The job market for software engineering in Tokyo is equivalent to a Minneapolis or an Atlanta even with 20x the population - and even then I might be overselling it. Look at the culture and the accomplishments of a place like Rakuten, and plot a way forward from that to a tech powerhouse. I don't see it.
- rtpg 10y ago
  I don't really see what you're getting at. Yeah, the salaries are depressed, but all salaries in Tokyo are depressed, it's part of a general trend. And Rakuten does a lot of stuff. There are also places like GMO that do things. This is kind of like complaining that Ebay isn't a tech powerhouse. That's totally fine
  - deciplex 10y ago
    Point taken, but to clarify I was saying "plot a way forward for Japan to become a tech powerhouse, when a company like Rakuten is about the pinnacle of what they can achieve as far as technology companies go". And you can't really just say "they can do X, Y, and Z" if X, Y, and Z are things that are totally unrealistic to expect Japan corporate culture to do. Even Rakuten is considered "weird" to the point of apostasy among Japanese corporations, and I promise you would not find it particularly enriching to work there either from a creativity standpoint or even just for basic work/life balance. It's just difficult to imagine how a world-class tech company can rise up from Japanese business culture, at least on time scales that don't span decades. (For me, anyway, YMMV I guess.)
    - nihonde 10y ago
      Cookpad also seems to be a nice brain trust of capable coders. It's perplexing to me that Japan isn't better at software. It's practically nerd nation with tons of super talented designers. It feels like it should be easy to push Japan over the tipping point, but who knows why it hasn't happened yet.
Olscore 10y ago
This may not be a good idea. Code is one of those things that by itself sucks until you have a reason or purpose to use it. I started learning coding around age ~9 in 1996 or so. But what got me hooked was websites, because I could use the code to build fan sites or accomplish real, purposeful tasks. I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow.
- deciplex 10y ago
  Give them the tools and kids will often find a use for it on their own. Someone shoved Hypercard in front of me when I was eleven or so and started me on the path (rather, they shoved a Mac in front of me on which Hypercard happened to be installed - I took it from there). Of course not every kid will find it compelling enough to do so, but then not every kid should aspire to be a programmer.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
  Many (all?) subjects that are taught at schools are already like that. People don't see the value until they need the skills.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  You can apply this logic to almost all subjects in school aside from the very basic ones (math, reading/writing) and even then you can argue school need not be teaching at a high level. > I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow. We shove kids into biology, chemistry, physics, literature, art, etc. The ones that like it will make it their career or college major. The ones that don't will forget and throw away their notes after the final. The same will happen with programming classes.
  - choosername 10y ago
    nuh, up to a certain point you won't learn much that's not at least interesting, save for french. And even that could help me with latin now, had I learned it better. Sure there's details only needed in a career, but that's late and kept to a minimum for obvious reasons, was for me. The investment is the pupils choice and the rdturn on investment is debateable. You argue diminishing returns, I say scientific responsibility can be a burdon indeed, so what I really dislike is that it's forced.
kiba 10y ago
It's going to be butchered like English class to point of utter uselessness, no? It's like learning Spanish and then totally and utterly forgetting it. What is then, the leftover value after one finish his secondary education?
- PakG1 10y ago
  It's like learning Spanish and then totally and utterly forgetting it. What is then, the leftover value after one finish his secondary education? I'm not sure that's true. Programming intrinsically requires logical thinking and problem-solving. So it has the potential to shape young brains and teach them cognitive skills that will stay with them for the long-term, whether or not they remember certain techniques or languages. It's like math. Do I remember how to derive the quadratic formula? Heck, no. I can't even remember what it is, I'd have to look it up on Google. I'm sure I could do it again if I really wanted to though. But I bet my cognitive skills are better today because I at one point in time learned to derive the quadratic formula in my math class, among many other things. edit: It's like how Lego and models helps kids to learn spatial skills and fine motor skills. There are lots of things that teach skills taken for granted by adults, but aren't readily apparent to children unless they're thrown into a situation where they use them.
  - droopyEyelids 10y ago
    Oh man it makes my heart ache to read what you wrote here. > Programming intrinsically requires logical thinking and problem solving. Doesn't everything that schools break down into rote steps to be followed dogmatically without understanding? From writing to your example math, there is nothing that inherently challenging interesting and enjoyable that a teacher can't turn into a mind-numbing chore.
- dcw303 10y ago
  I don't see much leftover value, but I do see benefit in increasing exposure to programming for all kids at a young age. Most will forget it, but for the interested ones it could be a gateway into further learning.
- 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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quxbar 10y ago
Wow, in 20 years Japan will be producing some amazing technology. I think people underestimate how transformative an understanding of programmatic problem solving can be. I'd put it only slightly under literacy.
- gjolund 10y ago
  I would put it on the same level as literacy and basic arithmetic. It exposes you to entirely know ways to solve problems, a basic understanding of computer science on a societal level would be amazing.
  - elliotec 10y ago
    There's no way it is on the same level as literacy and basic arithmetic, at least not for decades if not longer. Literacy rates in the modern world are close to 100%, near the same can add and subtract. Programmatic thinking requires much more effort and skill, at least right now, and that's why we are getting hella paid. It's almost like saying accounting or medicine is the same level as literacy. Or on the low end of education and vocational skills, carpentry or plumbing. Not everyone will know how to be a plumber, a doctor, an accountant, or a software developer, and that's just fine. Most people should know how to read and count and that is also fine.
    - tedks 10y ago
      Good software engineering is ridiculously difficult to the extent that nobody gets it right, everything sucks everywhere, and there's no way to win. It requires a lot of domain expertise and background knowledge that goes far beyond just programming. That's why developers are, as you put it, hella paid. That said, programmatic thinking itself is much simpler. Learning how to think algorithmically and think about things like recursion, iteration, functional abstraction, etc., are definitely things everyone can learn to do. And this sort of thinking is valuable in areas other than software engineering. The weakest thing you can claim is that knowing programming lets people write programs, which is somewhat popular hobby activity among people can do it regardless of their profession, and something that there's some value in given the success of IFTT, Tasker, and similar systems that either approach or are actually programming.
gjolund 10y ago
It should be taught in tandem with Mathematics, as a way to explore and apply the concepts they are learning. America should start doing this as soon as possible, been saying it for years.
minionslave 10y ago
Same with teaching French, Piano, Recorder, Photography. It will give people some exposure to something new. Most won't be interested, but a few would have discovered their passion.
- imtringued 10y ago
  I learned english as a third language by actually using it instead of just "learning" it and then get good grades for free.
itazula 10y ago
The value, I think, is that Japanese society as a whole will at least appreciate programming. Whether that appreciation is as a craft that is not always so easy, or as something that sometimes even approaches art, I do not know, but some of today's kids will be the ones who grow up to either approve or disapprove future projects. An understanding sown in youth and shared by a generation goes a long way.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Idont think it will make any difference at all. Do you think people have an appreciation for Geography or History even though they all had exposure to it during school? Most of the time it aint the case.
  - itazula 10y ago
    A generation or two down the line, history may record that this was an important event in Japanese history. And perhaps, as you imply, that sentence in a history book will be glossed over by generations even farther in the future. The populace may not even know how their society came to be what it is. But the government, I think, is envisioning a certain future, and planting the seeds to create that future.
pessimizer 10y ago
That's much better than just assuming people are too stupid to know how things work and using that as an excuse to force immutable defaults on them that are favorable to our business model. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the average Japanese elementary school student will spend a significant amount of time over the next 60-110 years using computers (approximately 99.8% of their waking hours.) When I was 8 in 1984, they didn't think we were too dumb to learn BASIC and Logo. I wonder what happened to make kids so stupid since then?
cpprototypes 10y ago
Just a little bit of programming can be powerful. If I were designing an elementary school course, it would focus on two things: 1) How to clean data. Real world data is always dirty. It mixes strings and ints, has commas and quotes where they shouldn't be, etc. Knowing how to think of data in terms of a standard format and having a plan for exceptions is very important. 2) How to manipulate data. Python, JS, or some other simple dynamic language. Teach how to do functional style programming such as list.forEach(<lambda>) to transform or analyze data. It's easy to make homework and tests for something like this. And these are fundamental skills. It doesn't matter if Python or JS fades away. It doesn't matter if popular formats change from JSON to something else. It's about teaching how to think about data and how to get it in a form where it's easy and reliable to do analysis or transformations with it. We don't need to make programming "fun". We need to treat it like algebra. A basic skill that all should learn. But that doesn't mean making web pages or mobile apps. And it also doesn't mean the theory focused CS topics like data structures and algorithms. Just start with learning how to think of data in a standard form like CSV or JSON. And how to use a programming language like JS/Python to do something with the data. After students master these skills, it can be integrated into science classes. Students will know how to write simple scripts to clean up the data from a lab test and analyze it.
- ido 10y ago
  If you treat it like alegbra, the average school kid will know about as much programming as they know algebra 1 year after graduating (i.e. nothing). They can learn all the basics of programming by making a game of their choice (with some guidance to make sure they're not over-scoping it).
sdlion 10y ago
I guess they might be also worried about the low literacy on computer knowledge among their citizens.[1] More mandatory programming courses could increase existence of desktop/laptop in households. The reference I included says that most people prefer smartphones than desktops/laptops, and programming could be a good enough reason to make them use them. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11758933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11758933
deleted 10y ago
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unabst 10y ago
In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that can program, so teachers from other subjects will be filling in picking up the material from textbooks as they go along. From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them. It happens whenever there is an English native speaker in a Japanese English class (guilty as charged), and it will happen whenever there is a real programmer in one of these "programming" classes -- at least for the foreseeable future. --- [1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/28/editorials/disappointing-levels-english/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/28/editorials/di... [2] http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/whats-wrong-with-english-education-in-japan-pull-up-a-chair http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/whats-wron...
- marak830 10y ago
  As an English teacher I'm seeing a lot of change in the new generation of teachers. I teach high school student part time (so I can work on my side project), and the teachers over the age of 40ish have pretty terrible English(these are English teachers), but all of the newer ones have pretty good levels. I have even been notified a few teachers are going to the US for a few weeks to get immersed in English as a sort of brush up. The biggest issue I see so far is the lack of checking of foreign teachers, I work with a few whose work sheets for the students are riddled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar. Edit: typo(haha sigh).
  - adrianN 10y ago
    > whose work sheets Sorry, I couldn't resist.
    - marak830 10y ago
      Haha I'm on a train and autocorrect is a bit of a bitch :-p (That actually scares the crap out of me, missing something like that on something I give the students)
bronz 10y ago
dont get me wrong, i will never go against any kind of improvement or expansion of basic education. However, seeing how i have invested quite a lot of time and money into my computer science degree (finishing up in about a year), i am a little concerned that soon programming is going be devalued as a profession because of programs like these. is that wrong? also they said that they have been doing this in isreal since 2000, anybody know how that turned out?
harisenbon 10y ago
Ironically I was just lamenting the fact that my daughter won't get access to a computer in her Japanese elementary school until 5th grade. And she goes to public magnet school. While it's great that they are pushing forward to say that programming is important, I have little confidence that they'll be able to make it a reality.
agumonkey 10y ago
Well I do hope they bring back Prolog or aim for Agda or something symbolic, not byte crunching and MVC. Mainstream coding is a mental regression.
danbruc 10y ago
I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be different? Because computers and software are so omnipresent? Maybe. But programming is also definitely pretty hard. Is it worth the time? Can you spent enough time learning to program so that it is actually useful in the end without negatively affecting other subjects? I mean in Germany we learn FizzBuzz-level programming in school (and that is what sent me down the software development route) but I don't think that has a lasting impact on many. When I see what most people are struggling with when using their computers and phones, I would say they don't have to learn to program, they have to learn how those devices, operating systems and protocols work. DHCP or DNS not working? What's up with those drivers? Have you looked into the log file? Is the daemon running? But then again this looks a lot like those kinds of complexities that we used to hide from consumers and have professional mechanics for. We have already come a long way from MS-DOS with everyone using the command line and fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to a Windows 10 tablet trying to bury all the ugly details under a shinny surface.
- ousta 10y ago
  you don't get it. this is the blue collar job of the next two decades and as for any blue collar job we will need lot of people with the skill to make the job market cheap. get ready for this.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Is there actually evidence that we need more people in IT? The first thing I found was this chart [1] of the GDP split by economic sectors. If things didn't change much over the last five years this doesn't really look like we need everyone in IT. Also the next two decades seems a bit short, it will take about a decade for changes in the education system to show up in the market. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Economy_as_Percent_of_GDP_1947-2009.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Econom...
unusximmortalis 10y ago
If by programming they mean algorithms and really presented in a fun way then it is great. And next thing is to understand that the best algo one can learn as early as possible is the algo that allows you (teaches you) to learn when you want to do it.
facepalm 10y ago
I think it is OK to do this. When I was in elementary school, we also learned knitting. Why not programming, too? Some basic skill that could be useful at times. However, seeing how abysmal general knowledge of mathematics is (in Western countries, don't know about Japan), I wouldn't expect huge numbers of skilled coders to emerge from school because of the inclusion of the subject.
emptyfile 10y ago
Had obligatory programming classes in my eastern european science gymnasium (high school). We worked in Pascal and my younger sister goes to the same school now and works in Python. Like any other class kids who were interested in it did good and most of them went to CS colleges, 90% who didn't care memorized it without thinking got a passing grade and never thought about it again, same with logic, psychology, sociology, philosophy, chemistry or any number of other obligatory classes we were forced to take.
brianzelip 10y ago
Interesting point at the end: > How teachers can acquire the necessary knowledge and teaching expertise will be the biggest hurdle for Japan to clear before computer programming becomes a required subject at school. Developing the skills in teachers is an issue. I think all of this effort towards learning to program is great. Good learning resources like [FreeCodeCamp](https://freecodecamp.com https://freecodecamp.com) are just going to keep getting better.
sdroz 10y ago
If this does go smoothly (and I hope it does), I imagine an issue being the bottleneck of higher education. I go to school at a top CS university in America and the demand for CS classes has far surpassed the supply. Students are waitlisted in the 50s-100s for CS classes they need to take for the major. What is going to happen when the influx of CS students increases 2x, 5x..? Hopefully higher-ed will figure it out before then.
artur_makly 10y ago
i smell a fun jap/eng coding school startup idea in the making.
Zklsalue8 10y ago
Math is such a wonderful and useful invention. Making people learn mathematics at school has made everyone love mathematics, take it up professionally, and become skilled mathematicians... You see my point. Most people hate math because of their experiences with it in school. I see the same thing happening with coding. It's gonna turn more people away from it than it ever turns onto it. May even do more net damage than good. (Anecdote: in my intro programming class, many people did not like it, even though they self selected to do it.)
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Learning to program is a very very different thing. You can use programming to learn math and play games and mix the two. My son loves learning programming. He isn't learning it like you and i learned math. He is playing it. Adjusting it, slowly understanding the concepts of loops, if/then etc. conceptually, later literally. So at least I don't se your point :)
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    The point is that you can play and experiment with math. But compulsory education turns it into pointless shitty drills that make most students hate it.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      That completely depends on how education of it is executed.
- mcbits 10y ago
  Are there any public schools where mathematics is completely optional, so we can compare the proportion of those students who move on to mathy occupations (and how well the others do in life with no math education whatsoever)? It might be better to think of programming more like a digital shop class. Not every high school graduate will be a welder or cabinet maker, but we do expect them to be able to build and repair simple items without losing a limb. For the last 15 years, it's like everyone has had a full-featured digital machine shop in their home and didn't even know it was there, much less how to use it.
sickbeard 10y ago
I think personal finance would be far more valuable to students than programming.
ezoe 10y ago
As a Japanese and a Programmer, I seriously worries about this move. For one thing, almost all current teachers has no experience of programming. Other thing is the culture of teaching in Japan. When you solve the problem by using a knowledge that isn't teached yet, the teacher said. "You can't do that! You haven't been taught that yet!" So, I can see the future where they say "You can't use recursion! You haven't been taught that yet!" Also, there is a seriously stupid culture in Japanese teaching. Given a problem, "He went shopping and brought 6 candy bags which contains 3 candies each. How many candies does he have?" The answer must be "6 * 3 = 18". not "3 * 6 = 18" The multiplication is not commutative. Because... I don't know. Some so called teaching expert who is the author of some textbook explicitly stated that. (Actually, it must be 3 * 6 = 18 in original Japanese because, the word order of Japanese grammar requires to write like "he brought bag which contains 3 candies, 6." indicating this isn't even a math problem at all.) That's why I worries about it. As for Japanese isn't fluent in English even though we have mandatory English class, It's totally different reason. School in Japan's English teaching is in fact bad. But that isn't the reason. If you're living in Japan, you have absolutely no reason to use English at all in your entire life. You can't improve language skill without actually using it.

415 points by astdb 10y ago

It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this will have on their society and industry. I know everyone has their anecdotal opinion as to whether this a good or bad idea, but we really won't know until a decade or so has passed. I'm interested to see whether the gender ratio of programmers will change at all.

euske 10y ago
This. I would be very much curious too, whether if this can have a cultural impact. If not, I'd say it's largely uninteresting. Sure they'll make a couple of successful developers, but I'd rather want to live in a society where people have proper understanding/respect to tech jobs than the same old society with a few math/programming prodigies.
nkozyra 10y ago
The greatest potential effect is demystifying "programming." Simply writing code is quite a different set of skills from being a developer, but to many people even superficially it's magic.

zygomega 10y ago

I wish 'programming' included teaching our kids how to be proficient users of technology. How to effectively google, how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine, how to secure your privacy are the type of skills I hope are included in this definition. The architectural and process engineering aspects of programming are better left to learn in adulthood.

wingerlang 10y ago
> How to effectively google Sounds good > how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine Uhh, even as a developer I barely ever feel I need to do this (and frankly, I do this quite often). Being able to ssh into another machine is extremely low on the list of things to learn before being proficient.
- ploxiln 10y ago
  maybe. but text mode is pretty fundamental really. It could be powershell or anything I guess, as long as it had files and commands and was both interactive and scriptable
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    From your perspective maybe. My whole family use computers daily, some do it at work as well I guess and I would bet the number of times they have needed to go into a shell would be exactly zero. I doubt they even know about terminals to be honest. Simply not needed.
    - burfog 10y ago
      It doesn't seem needed because you aren't used to what you can do with it. If you were good at it, you'd be horrified at the thought of not having that capability. It's not just about launching programs and moving files around one by one. A decent shell, like bash, is fully programmable. It lets you express yourself in ways that no GUI does, possibly excepting LabView or Scratch.
      - wingerlang 10y ago
        I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user). I also think that even if this was taught from the beginning - it'd remain a power user thing. But I agree, I use automation/scripting/bash every day and would be horrified to loose this ability. But I also know other developer who doesn't use it at all.
        Morgawr 10y ago
        >I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user). I agree with you but you couldn't have chosen a worse example. Mass renaming, tagging or formatting of files is one of the most performed operations of an everyday user and is a massive time sink for people who don't know how to programmatically do it. Classification of downloaded music or movies is very common. Same goes for moving files around and renaming folders and mass-moving documents. I remember when I had to re-format around 1000 images for a friend of mine because he wanted a different size + format to create some photo album. Just a couple of imagemagick lines vs him and I manually spending a lot of hours doing it painstakingly picture by picture.
gruez 10y ago
>how to secure your privacy Do you think kids still care about privacy? As in, the giving all your life details to google kind, not the public Facebook profile kind.

smaili 10y ago

Anyone have any thoughts as to why they would take the bottom up approach (ie, start with elementary and go up) rather than top down?

nihonde 10y ago
Keep in mind that elementary school kids in Japan also attend evening "cram" schools, where they drill on the subjects on the curriculum. I wouldn't be surprised if the real learning happens at Kumon, etc. By the time they're in high school, it seems like it's all about passing tests and getting into college, but I never went to Japanese school, so my perspective could be totally wrong.
pcurve 10y ago
what do you mean top down?
- 58028641 10y ago
  Top down = start with high school
- flamedoge 10y ago
  preorder
hanniabu 10y ago
Because it's useful to know. If you wait until college to learn it then you miss out on years of use. Having kids get experience with it early on opens their options too. It makes it a less daunting career option. I wish I had exposure earlier on. If I did then I definitely would have gone for CS rather than mechanical engineering.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
proyb2 10y ago
It would be idea to start in secondary/high school as in educations in Singapore does.

deciplex 10y ago

Maybe they should also find something for those programmers to do as well, while they're at it. The job market for software engineering in Tokyo is equivalent to a Minneapolis or an Atlanta even with 20x the population - and even then I might be overselling it. Look at the culture and the accomplishments of a place like Rakuten, and plot a way forward from that to a tech powerhouse. I don't see it.

rtpg 10y ago
I don't really see what you're getting at. Yeah, the salaries are depressed, but all salaries in Tokyo are depressed, it's part of a general trend. And Rakuten does a lot of stuff. There are also places like GMO that do things. This is kind of like complaining that Ebay isn't a tech powerhouse. That's totally fine
- deciplex 10y ago
  Point taken, but to clarify I was saying "plot a way forward for Japan to become a tech powerhouse, when a company like Rakuten is about the pinnacle of what they can achieve as far as technology companies go". And you can't really just say "they can do X, Y, and Z" if X, Y, and Z are things that are totally unrealistic to expect Japan corporate culture to do. Even Rakuten is considered "weird" to the point of apostasy among Japanese corporations, and I promise you would not find it particularly enriching to work there either from a creativity standpoint or even just for basic work/life balance. It's just difficult to imagine how a world-class tech company can rise up from Japanese business culture, at least on time scales that don't span decades. (For me, anyway, YMMV I guess.)
  - nihonde 10y ago
    Cookpad also seems to be a nice brain trust of capable coders. It's perplexing to me that Japan isn't better at software. It's practically nerd nation with tons of super talented designers. It feels like it should be easy to push Japan over the tipping point, but who knows why it hasn't happened yet.

Olscore 10y ago

This may not be a good idea. Code is one of those things that by itself sucks until you have a reason or purpose to use it. I started learning coding around age ~9 in 1996 or so. But what got me hooked was websites, because I could use the code to build fan sites or accomplish real, purposeful tasks. I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow.

deciplex 10y ago
Give them the tools and kids will often find a use for it on their own. Someone shoved Hypercard in front of me when I was eleven or so and started me on the path (rather, they shoved a Mac in front of me on which Hypercard happened to be installed - I took it from there). Of course not every kid will find it compelling enough to do so, but then not every kid should aspire to be a programmer.
2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
Many (all?) subjects that are taught at schools are already like that. People don't see the value until they need the skills.
sotojuan 10y ago
You can apply this logic to almost all subjects in school aside from the very basic ones (math, reading/writing) and even then you can argue school need not be teaching at a high level. > I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow. We shove kids into biology, chemistry, physics, literature, art, etc. The ones that like it will make it their career or college major. The ones that don't will forget and throw away their notes after the final. The same will happen with programming classes.
- choosername 10y ago
  nuh, up to a certain point you won't learn much that's not at least interesting, save for french. And even that could help me with latin now, had I learned it better. Sure there's details only needed in a career, but that's late and kept to a minimum for obvious reasons, was for me. The investment is the pupils choice and the rdturn on investment is debateable. You argue diminishing returns, I say scientific responsibility can be a burdon indeed, so what I really dislike is that it's forced.

kiba 10y ago

It's going to be butchered like English class to point of utter uselessness, no? It's like learning Spanish and then totally and utterly forgetting it. What is then, the leftover value after one finish his secondary education?

PakG1 10y ago
It's like learning Spanish and then totally and utterly forgetting it. What is then, the leftover value after one finish his secondary education? I'm not sure that's true. Programming intrinsically requires logical thinking and problem-solving. So it has the potential to shape young brains and teach them cognitive skills that will stay with them for the long-term, whether or not they remember certain techniques or languages. It's like math. Do I remember how to derive the quadratic formula? Heck, no. I can't even remember what it is, I'd have to look it up on Google. I'm sure I could do it again if I really wanted to though. But I bet my cognitive skills are better today because I at one point in time learned to derive the quadratic formula in my math class, among many other things. edit: It's like how Lego and models helps kids to learn spatial skills and fine motor skills. There are lots of things that teach skills taken for granted by adults, but aren't readily apparent to children unless they're thrown into a situation where they use them.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  Oh man it makes my heart ache to read what you wrote here. > Programming intrinsically requires logical thinking and problem solving. Doesn't everything that schools break down into rote steps to be followed dogmatically without understanding? From writing to your example math, there is nothing that inherently challenging interesting and enjoyable that a teacher can't turn into a mind-numbing chore.
dcw303 10y ago
I don't see much leftover value, but I do see benefit in increasing exposure to programming for all kids at a young age. Most will forget it, but for the interested ones it could be a gateway into further learning.
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quxbar 10y ago

Wow, in 20 years Japan will be producing some amazing technology. I think people underestimate how transformative an understanding of programmatic problem solving can be. I'd put it only slightly under literacy.

gjolund 10y ago
I would put it on the same level as literacy and basic arithmetic. It exposes you to entirely know ways to solve problems, a basic understanding of computer science on a societal level would be amazing.
- elliotec 10y ago
  There's no way it is on the same level as literacy and basic arithmetic, at least not for decades if not longer. Literacy rates in the modern world are close to 100%, near the same can add and subtract. Programmatic thinking requires much more effort and skill, at least right now, and that's why we are getting hella paid. It's almost like saying accounting or medicine is the same level as literacy. Or on the low end of education and vocational skills, carpentry or plumbing. Not everyone will know how to be a plumber, a doctor, an accountant, or a software developer, and that's just fine. Most people should know how to read and count and that is also fine.
  - tedks 10y ago
    Good software engineering is ridiculously difficult to the extent that nobody gets it right, everything sucks everywhere, and there's no way to win. It requires a lot of domain expertise and background knowledge that goes far beyond just programming. That's why developers are, as you put it, hella paid. That said, programmatic thinking itself is much simpler. Learning how to think algorithmically and think about things like recursion, iteration, functional abstraction, etc., are definitely things everyone can learn to do. And this sort of thinking is valuable in areas other than software engineering. The weakest thing you can claim is that knowing programming lets people write programs, which is somewhat popular hobby activity among people can do it regardless of their profession, and something that there's some value in given the success of IFTT, Tasker, and similar systems that either approach or are actually programming.

gjolund 10y ago

It should be taught in tandem with Mathematics, as a way to explore and apply the concepts they are learning. America should start doing this as soon as possible, been saying it for years.

minionslave 10y ago

Same with teaching French, Piano, Recorder, Photography. It will give people some exposure to something new. Most won't be interested, but a few would have discovered their passion.

imtringued 10y ago
I learned english as a third language by actually using it instead of just "learning" it and then get good grades for free.

itazula 10y ago

The value, I think, is that Japanese society as a whole will at least appreciate programming. Whether that appreciation is as a craft that is not always so easy, or as something that sometimes even approaches art, I do not know, but some of today's kids will be the ones who grow up to either approve or disapprove future projects. An understanding sown in youth and shared by a generation goes a long way.

ekianjo 10y ago
Idont think it will make any difference at all. Do you think people have an appreciation for Geography or History even though they all had exposure to it during school? Most of the time it aint the case.
- itazula 10y ago
  A generation or two down the line, history may record that this was an important event in Japanese history. And perhaps, as you imply, that sentence in a history book will be glossed over by generations even farther in the future. The populace may not even know how their society came to be what it is. But the government, I think, is envisioning a certain future, and planting the seeds to create that future.

pessimizer 10y ago

That's much better than just assuming people are too stupid to know how things work and using that as an excuse to force immutable defaults on them that are favorable to our business model. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the average Japanese elementary school student will spend a significant amount of time over the next 60-110 years using computers (approximately 99.8% of their waking hours.) When I was 8 in 1984, they didn't think we were too dumb to learn BASIC and Logo. I wonder what happened to make kids so stupid since then?

cpprototypes 10y ago

Just a little bit of programming can be powerful. If I were designing an elementary school course, it would focus on two things: 1) How to clean data. Real world data is always dirty. It mixes strings and ints, has commas and quotes where they shouldn't be, etc. Knowing how to think of data in terms of a standard format and having a plan for exceptions is very important. 2) How to manipulate data. Python, JS, or some other simple dynamic language. Teach how to do functional style programming such as list.forEach(<lambda>) to transform or analyze data. It's easy to make homework and tests for something like this. And these are fundamental skills. It doesn't matter if Python or JS fades away. It doesn't matter if popular formats change from JSON to something else. It's about teaching how to think about data and how to get it in a form where it's easy and reliable to do analysis or transformations with it. We don't need to make programming "fun". We need to treat it like algebra. A basic skill that all should learn. But that doesn't mean making web pages or mobile apps. And it also doesn't mean the theory focused CS topics like data structures and algorithms. Just start with learning how to think of data in a standard form like CSV or JSON. And how to use a programming language like JS/Python to do something with the data. After students master these skills, it can be integrated into science classes. Students will know how to write simple scripts to clean up the data from a lab test and analyze it.

ido 10y ago
If you treat it like alegbra, the average school kid will know about as much programming as they know algebra 1 year after graduating (i.e. nothing). They can learn all the basics of programming by making a game of their choice (with some guidance to make sure they're not over-scoping it).

sdlion 10y ago

I guess they might be also worried about the low literacy on computer knowledge among their citizens.[1] More mandatory programming courses could increase existence of desktop/laptop in households. The reference I included says that most people prefer smartphones than desktops/laptops, and programming could be a good enough reason to make them use them. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11758933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11758933

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unabst 10y ago

In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2] This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it. As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that can program, so teachers from other subjects will be filling in picking up the material from textbooks as they go along. From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them. It happens whenever there is an English native speaker in a Japanese English class (guilty as charged), and it will happen whenever there is a real programmer in one of these "programming" classes -- at least for the foreseeable future. --- [1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/28/editorials/disappointing-levels-english/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/28/editorials/di... [2] http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/whats-wrong-with-english-education-in-japan-pull-up-a-chair http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/whats-wron...

marak830 10y ago
As an English teacher I'm seeing a lot of change in the new generation of teachers. I teach high school student part time (so I can work on my side project), and the teachers over the age of 40ish have pretty terrible English(these are English teachers), but all of the newer ones have pretty good levels. I have even been notified a few teachers are going to the US for a few weeks to get immersed in English as a sort of brush up. The biggest issue I see so far is the lack of checking of foreign teachers, I work with a few whose work sheets for the students are riddled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar. Edit: typo(haha sigh).
- adrianN 10y ago
  > whose work sheets Sorry, I couldn't resist.
  - marak830 10y ago
    Haha I'm on a train and autocorrect is a bit of a bitch :-p (That actually scares the crap out of me, missing something like that on something I give the students)

bronz 10y ago

dont get me wrong, i will never go against any kind of improvement or expansion of basic education. However, seeing how i have invested quite a lot of time and money into my computer science degree (finishing up in about a year), i am a little concerned that soon programming is going be devalued as a profession because of programs like these. is that wrong? also they said that they have been doing this in isreal since 2000, anybody know how that turned out?

harisenbon 10y ago

Ironically I was just lamenting the fact that my daughter won't get access to a computer in her Japanese elementary school until 5th grade. And she goes to public magnet school. While it's great that they are pushing forward to say that programming is important, I have little confidence that they'll be able to make it a reality.

agumonkey 10y ago

Well I do hope they bring back Prolog or aim for Agda or something symbolic, not byte crunching and MVC. Mainstream coding is a mental regression.

danbruc 10y ago

I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be different? Because computers and software are so omnipresent? Maybe. But programming is also definitely pretty hard. Is it worth the time? Can you spent enough time learning to program so that it is actually useful in the end without negatively affecting other subjects? I mean in Germany we learn FizzBuzz-level programming in school (and that is what sent me down the software development route) but I don't think that has a lasting impact on many. When I see what most people are struggling with when using their computers and phones, I would say they don't have to learn to program, they have to learn how those devices, operating systems and protocols work. DHCP or DNS not working? What's up with those drivers? Have you looked into the log file? Is the daemon running? But then again this looks a lot like those kinds of complexities that we used to hide from consumers and have professional mechanics for. We have already come a long way from MS-DOS with everyone using the command line and fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to a Windows 10 tablet trying to bury all the ugly details under a shinny surface.

ousta 10y ago
you don't get it. this is the blue collar job of the next two decades and as for any blue collar job we will need lot of people with the skill to make the job market cheap. get ready for this.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Is there actually evidence that we need more people in IT? The first thing I found was this chart [1] of the GDP split by economic sectors. If things didn't change much over the last five years this doesn't really look like we need everyone in IT. Also the next two decades seems a bit short, it will take about a decade for changes in the education system to show up in the market. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Economy_as_Percent_of_GDP_1947-2009.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Econom...

unusximmortalis 10y ago

If by programming they mean algorithms and really presented in a fun way then it is great. And next thing is to understand that the best algo one can learn as early as possible is the algo that allows you (teaches you) to learn when you want to do it.

facepalm 10y ago

I think it is OK to do this. When I was in elementary school, we also learned knitting. Why not programming, too? Some basic skill that could be useful at times. However, seeing how abysmal general knowledge of mathematics is (in Western countries, don't know about Japan), I wouldn't expect huge numbers of skilled coders to emerge from school because of the inclusion of the subject.

emptyfile 10y ago

Had obligatory programming classes in my eastern european science gymnasium (high school). We worked in Pascal and my younger sister goes to the same school now and works in Python. Like any other class kids who were interested in it did good and most of them went to CS colleges, 90% who didn't care memorized it without thinking got a passing grade and never thought about it again, same with logic, psychology, sociology, philosophy, chemistry or any number of other obligatory classes we were forced to take.

brianzelip 10y ago

Interesting point at the end: > How teachers can acquire the necessary knowledge and teaching expertise will be the biggest hurdle for Japan to clear before computer programming becomes a required subject at school. Developing the skills in teachers is an issue. I think all of this effort towards learning to program is great. Good learning resources like [FreeCodeCamp](https://freecodecamp.com https://freecodecamp.com) are just going to keep getting better.

sdroz 10y ago

If this does go smoothly (and I hope it does), I imagine an issue being the bottleneck of higher education. I go to school at a top CS university in America and the demand for CS classes has far surpassed the supply. Students are waitlisted in the 50s-100s for CS classes they need to take for the major. What is going to happen when the influx of CS students increases 2x, 5x..? Hopefully higher-ed will figure it out before then.

artur_makly 10y ago

i smell a fun jap/eng coding school startup idea in the making.

Zklsalue8 10y ago

Math is such a wonderful and useful invention. Making people learn mathematics at school has made everyone love mathematics, take it up professionally, and become skilled mathematicians... You see my point. Most people hate math because of their experiences with it in school. I see the same thing happening with coding. It's gonna turn more people away from it than it ever turns onto it. May even do more net damage than good. (Anecdote: in my intro programming class, many people did not like it, even though they self selected to do it.)

ThomPete 10y ago
Learning to program is a very very different thing. You can use programming to learn math and play games and mix the two. My son loves learning programming. He isn't learning it like you and i learned math. He is playing it. Adjusting it, slowly understanding the concepts of loops, if/then etc. conceptually, later literally. So at least I don't se your point :)
- kazagistar 10y ago
  The point is that you can play and experiment with math. But compulsory education turns it into pointless shitty drills that make most students hate it.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    That completely depends on how education of it is executed.
mcbits 10y ago
Are there any public schools where mathematics is completely optional, so we can compare the proportion of those students who move on to mathy occupations (and how well the others do in life with no math education whatsoever)? It might be better to think of programming more like a digital shop class. Not every high school graduate will be a welder or cabinet maker, but we do expect them to be able to build and repair simple items without losing a limb. For the last 15 years, it's like everyone has had a full-featured digital machine shop in their home and didn't even know it was there, much less how to use it.

sickbeard 10y ago

I think personal finance would be far more valuable to students than programming.

ezoe 10y ago

As a Japanese and a Programmer, I seriously worries about this move. For one thing, almost all current teachers has no experience of programming. Other thing is the culture of teaching in Japan. When you solve the problem by using a knowledge that isn't teached yet, the teacher said. "You can't do that! You haven't been taught that yet!" So, I can see the future where they say "You can't use recursion! You haven't been taught that yet!" Also, there is a seriously stupid culture in Japanese teaching. Given a problem, "He went shopping and brought 6 candy bags which contains 3 candies each. How many candies does he have?" The answer must be "6 * 3 = 18". not "3 * 6 = 18" The multiplication is not commutative. Because... I don't know. Some so called teaching expert who is the author of some textbook explicitly stated that. (Actually, it must be 3 * 6 = 18 in original Japanese because, the word order of Japanese grammar requires to write like "he brought bag which contains 3 candies, 6." indicating this isn't even a math problem at all.) That's why I worries about it. As for Japanese isn't fluent in English even though we have mandatory English class, It's totally different reason. School in Japan's English teaching is in fact bad. But that isn't the reason. If you're living in Japan, you have absolutely no reason to use English at all in your entire life. You can't improve language skill without actually using it.