What If Coding Classes Were Mandatory?

In my school we programmed super-boring stuff with turbo pascal in the most non-intuitive way ever.
Trust me, even the computer nerds were demotivated by all this. I just can imagine how all the non-tech persons would have been even more scared off by all this and many career choices would have ended up very different IMO.

However, there were also fun parts, like a good friend finding out that net send * was not blocked and he sent a friendly moo to all machines in the school network.... 🙈

I am pro digital education but to me it's more important for "the masses" to learn about privacy, data sovereignty, how the web works (and how it not works), implications of releasing any information on the web or why mobile phones are basically mobile wiretaps....

If coding was mandatory, it may have shortened the time it took me to figure out what I wanted to do as an adult or it could have turned me off completely. I was always told I was bad at math as a youth. However, that ended up being my college major. The thing is, when I got to college I had more freedom to explore the things I liked. Of course, I never had performance problems when it came to other subjects. I think the make or break thing for a coding course would be taking an approach similar to the arts rather than math. I took computer classes when I was younger, and they were interesting but ultimately didn't really capture the imagination. Art was always great though because art classes involved looking at completed works and learning how to do something similar. Rote memorization and thoughtless reproduction kill inspiration and should not be widely used in academia, yet those techniques form the backbone of teaching styles for STEM in pre-college levels.

Where I go to school, they teach us basically the same thing year after year. (Like, here's how to move a shape around!) So in grade twelve, what we'd be learning would be console.log('Hello, World!'). Because that's how my school system works :/

When I was in college, the first class of "introduction to programming" was mandatory for everyone regardless of their major.

Granted, it wasn't really coding. It was getting people fiddling around with Visual Basic for anyone that was not studying computer science.

Growing up, I viewed the world mostly through an entrepreneurial scope so I tended to care about things that impacted my life and the people around me. The way STEM was taught made me think my brain was not meant for such things 😝

But I was super lucky to have had a computer at a really young age, and I fell head over heels with all the cool stuff I could do. I pushed that thing to its limit lol

I'm 35 today, and I have the same warm feeling now with science and engineering, but it took at a decade of massive self-doubt to get there.

Had I started early, I think I would've been Tony Stark by now.

I think if you do, teach it in a way that will be useful to people, and teach it to exercise general algorithmic thinking skills or encourage automation mindsets.

I first started coding programs on my school calculator to automate formulas and cheat go faster on tests. Actually, I probably learned all that math stuff better because of that.

Given how test-centric and stressful our education processes can sometimes be, I would oppose this.

Programming requires a significant amount of focus, determination, and perseverance, just like any other skill. If someone doesn’t want these skills, they will never develop them, and that should be fine.

Also, programming is not just one skill. You can teach someone to program with code, but that still doesn’t teach them how to decompose a problem, debug, maintain, etc.

I teach as a component of my job, and the one thing I will never be able to teach is how to care about something you don’t care about.

There are a lot of programmers on the ADHD/Autism spectrum.

These types of people sometimes do very poorly in school due to the structure of learning. I'm bad at math. Growing up, CS was all about math. As a result I started very late. Speaking purely for myself, (also as someone who predates Google), mandatory programming classes would have likely turned me off programming by a lot.

Or maybe I'd have designed a quantum computer by now. Who knows.

My point is, forcing someone to learn something rarely goes well and can be very gatekeeper'y

My learning experience wouldn't have changed as I took my own initiative outside of school and elected to take the classes where programming opportunities existed.

Should programming be a mandatory subject? I would say yes in today's society, while we do need professions outside of software engineering, supplemental programming opportunities are only increasing outside of the primary career field. Mandatory programming course may not involve large or complex designs or patterns, but at a minimum provide students with a base understanding for something as simple as a macro in excel would enable a lot of people to be more effective with their careers.

If coding was a mandatory subject, I guess I would've showed up more.

Oddly enough, in high school (~2002), I would get in trouble for "skipping school", but in reality I was in the computer lab. Didn't want to be anywhere else. To me, nothing else really mattered.