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Code.org 2016 Annual Report
- candiodari 10y agoWhy 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.