Coding is a new literacy not the new literacy. I believe many high schools lack the recognition of computer science education in general. Many people overlook the differences between computer science and programming. Computer science courses are heavily based on mathematical computation rather than programming. Computer science courses like algorithms and data structures rely on a good background in mathematics. In many cases you will find students who are computer science majors and focus more on the mathematical methods they study and rather than programming. Programming essentially represents nothing more than a coding language that applies human logic to preform a task. In most cases you do not need to include extensive mathematics in programs which is what makes it different from Computer Science. That is why I think it is important that all students should be exposed to coding in some form or another.
In Obama’s final State of Union, he addressed us to help students learn to write computer code. I believe his message is a lot different than what it just seems. I think Obama intended on leaving the impression that he believes mathematics and computer science are important for our future so we should create the awareness of this field to students at a young age. I agree with Obama, other countries are progressing much faster because students are introduced to computer science and programming from the beginning. The reason why the United States remains behind is because they do not have the programs to support teaching computer science, according to one of the articles one tenth of high schools in the U.S. offer computer science courses.
I think the challenges schools might face for this is the price of providing such resources to learn how to code. Due to prices of computers and other technology it is likely that school will face the problem of funding such programs. Another issue is finding computer science teachers since most computer scientists are heavily involved in their work. A programming course should be fit into a typical curriculum like any other course. It is hard to say that it would be required but definitely for some majors other than computer science and absolutely offer it as an elective. Computer science courses should be counted for more credits than any other normal elective would. The biggest problem arises when deciding what content would be covered in these courses. The truth is that you can never expect a philosophy major or any other major for that matter to understand concepts such as variable, functions, lists and more. I believe these programming courses would be best off if they based their content on computational thinking and logic. A course like this would provides students with the most basic knowledge and understanding of how technology works in our world today.
It is hard to believe but my high school offered a programming class that was based on designing. As you can see programming can be used for many different things, not just computing mathematical methods like recursion. I think programming fundamentally is based on just being able to convert your logic to machine readable code. All the programs I’ve written I first began by writing a plan. Like an English major would write a outline for their paper I wrote plans for my programs. The plan was in English not code and demonstrated how I would write a program to logically solve my problem. The plan did require understanding the coding language first but the rest was purely my own logic. I think is important for all students to learn how to use logic and be able to apply it to our real world problems. I think that students should at least be introduced to the subject of programming and maybe schools can require it at a half year course but offer it at a full year course. I believe being able to program could be very useful to many people and also interest students into getting a degree in the field.
Ethical and Professional Issues 