Can Everyone Code?

Can everyone code?  Yes!

 

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a large conference for K-12 educators in Anaheim, California.  Organized by the ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), a “global community of educators dedicated to excellence in learning, teaching, and leading,” the conference featured numerous useful workshops and learning sessions, some of which I will highlight in this and future blogs. 

 

I participated in a longer workshop run by Apple called Everyone Can Code. True to its name, the underlying concept was that coding is a language that students can and should learn, starting even in lower school, so that they are familiar with how computers and the Internet really work.  Not only that, coding teaches students a precise sort of language in which every word or direction matters.  The program won’t run right if the programmer isn’t exact in his or her directions; it can’t do what you want unless you tell it exactly what you want.   So as a writing instructor I appreciate that lesson about making every word count.  In this session Apple admittedly was promoting their Swift Playgrounds app for iPads which does make coding incredibly accessible and allows students in schools that don’t have huge amounts of resources to get a start in coding.  More advanced students can also eventually use Swift as a programming language for making apps, as demonstrated in this online video: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=16.

 

Initiatives like this one from Apple and the incredible work from the website Code.org have led to more students coding than ever before.  The Code.org statement that “Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science” has certainly picked up momentum at both the secondary school and college level, so that more and more students truly are finding out about the joys of programming.  And it’s not only independent schools and STEM-oriented charters that are leading the charge; public school systems in Texas and Virginia, for example, are required to offer computer science curricula to all students in their states and count those courses towards graduation.

 

Some of us may remember when we learned such clunky and cumbersome programming languages as BASIC and FORTRAN.  Those languages required a lot of work just to get a very simple outcome.  Happily, those days are gone, as programming languages like Swift and Python make coding so much more straightforward, intuitive and satisfying.  As students in our new AP Computer Science Principles class have recently discovered, creating a program that does something cool can happen relatively quickly and without an extensive background in computer science. 

 

Our new Upper School requirement for students expects them to take at least two trimesters of computer science or Innovations electives.  New offerings in Python have been popular and have introduced students to the idea that coding is not only possible for them, but many students have discovered it is a passion of theirs.  They have taken additional classes as a result.

 

The new requirement has created some legitimate questions, especially in regard to how students will fit this into their already busy schedules.  We are aware of the fact that students have many requirements to fulfill and only 12 trimesters at CA to do it.  As always, we will continue to examine the best possible ways for students to balance their many interests, while of course keeping a close eye on their mental health and wellness.  But I do believe that these new skills are vital for students to know as they enter college and the workforce in the next several years.  Currently in the US there is a dearth of trained computer scientists and programmers.  (In Colorado alone there are 13,500 open computing jobs, according to Code.org.)  Beyond that, students—who are themselves prolific consumers of technology—ought to know how technology works and find ways to harness the potential themselves, regardless of what career paths they take.

 

Parents who have questions or concerns about the courses CA offers and how students fulfill our requirements should definitely reach out to their student’s advisor or class dean.  In the meantime, I suggest that everyone find an opportunity to try coding themselves!