Let's assume reading and writing is to literacy as is suggested at the start of the article. I think that's not too contentious. Given that, there's an odd asse

Let's assume reading and writing is to literacy as is suggested at the start of the article. I think that's not too contentious. Given that, there's an odd assertion in this article around Excel. To quote the article: "We create models by crafting them out of material. Sometimes our material is wood, metal, or plastic. Other times it's data or information from our senses. Either way, we start our models with a medium that we mold." With literacy, that material is words. When we start "modelling" with the written word, we first have to be able to understand a vocabulary, sentence structure, and ultimately a paragraph and narrative structure (beginning, middle, end). Normally this happens in the spoken word way before we need to express this through writing. We are also exposed to many, many, examples of paragraph and sentence construction in the written word before we are expected to write anything more than simple sentences. We first start writing by learning to express our vocabulary (spelling), with simple grammar, then putting our ideas together into sentences, paragraphs, and with narratives, and refine this modelling skill over a lifetime. With programming, that material is a programming language. When teaching, ideas of programming should ideally be discussed - loops, conditions, functions, variables, etc. Then move on to reading code - functions at a time, long before a line of code is written. Something like Scratch seems to be highly valuable for this, much in the same way that children have always had games where they are expected to put the words into a sentence in the correct order, usually before they are expected to be able to write the sentence themselves. For me the real disconnect, is that the material of modelling, the medium, for programming, is a programming language and code. Excel is NOT the medium of modelling for programming. Excel is a medium for modelling Excel. The constraints in Excel help people understand... Excel. It won't really help you understand data modelling, because the modelling you do is free-form. The constraints of Excel are unique to Excel.