Where are the kid coders? Not in U.S. schools

Caroline Craig:

If you plan to help your kids with their homework in the future, better start boning up on your programming skills now. (And you thought new math was hard!)

The U.K. Department of Education this week made a radical departure from its current curriculum, announcing plans to begin teaching "rigorous computer science" to all children ages 5 to 14. After studying the current state of instruction, the department concluded that computing in British schools had been "dumbed down" and attempts to teach programming dropped. Children were instead merely being exposed to word processors and spreadsheets, "mostly Word, Excel, and, of course, all running on Windows." They axed the curriculum, saying it was "so harmful, boring, and/or irrelevant it should simply be scrapped."

As the British education minister commented:

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 14, 2013 12:23 AM
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