This isn't what the article says... The articles says roughly that "while we know what to strive for, we are falling short of achieving our goals." It doesn't

This isn't what the article says... The articles says roughly that "while we know what to strive for, we are falling short of achieving our goals." It doesn't make the claim that we know how to teach programming. Now, unrelated to what the article says, I wanted to bring up this point: there are several ways we know how to teach something, and they apply better to different disciplines. For instance, the approach where we do lecture-lecture-lecture-seminar-test is what's used to teach subjects that require very little hands-on work (eg. law, history etc.) Then, there's lecture-lab-lecture-lab-lecture-lab-test approach, which is better suited to subjects like biology or electrical engineering etc. Some subjects have their own tradition of teaching that's mostly unique to them. Eg. painting is taught by assigning students to the professor's workshop, where they, basically, live for a few years. No formal "teaching" takes place, but the workshop's master interacts with students whenever he/she feels fit. Or, conservatory students who, usually, spend hours in one-on-one training with their teacher practicing their instrument of choice. What I think is happening in teaching to program is that because the field originated in math + engineering faculties, the tradition of how to teach it was borrowed from that space too: lectures + labs + tests. But, I think, that programming is more similar to painting in the way how it's done and how it could potentially be taught. So, instead of short-term labs and tests, it would be beneficial for the students to have long-term projects, possibly worked on in groups, where interaction with the teacher happens when the teacher inspects the work done so far and decides to provide feedback. The drawback of this approach is the grading that will not be defined formally and will be grounds for disputes between the students and the teachers. But, I still think it would've been better than the sequence of short-term assignments that must be worked on alone, because the later doesn't welcome and sometimes precludes the use of industry tools (s.a. version control systems, bug trackers). Essentially, today, those who are taught to program aren't taught how to use programming tools at all. Which is very weird to anyone coming from a school with a practical slant, where studying the tools would've been an essential part of the training.