Friday, October 13, 2017

Eli Meixler — Tim Cook Says Learning How to Code is More Important than English as a Second Language

Last month, the Apple exec told Fortune about how the company developed the programming language Swift to encourage students of all ages to learn to code.
“All this curriculum stuff is free. Anybody can have it that wants it around the world. We've done it in multiple languages,” he said.

4 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Coders uber allies....

André said...

I don't like Apple or Tim Cook and all their corporate bulls**t...

But, in that respect, I totally agree with him:

"said coding should be required in every public school in the world"

Matt Franko said...

Andre more than just coding should be added to 'required' imo...

We're letting a lot of people off the hook too easily...

Tom Hickey said...

School children should also learn some basic accounting. It's easy to include in math class and math should be taught much more hands-on by example anyway. Little people have to learn right of that math is useful.

John Dewey was big on emphasizing the pragmatic aspect of education over the rote.

Coding is especially easy to teach this way since kids seem to have a natural affinity for devices. Coding is what's inside. When asked what and how to teach young children, a sage said, "Teach them right off that the inside is more important than the outside."

Math folds into coding pretty easily, too. Actually, there is little separation of math and coding now, since almost no math is done by hand anymore. There are also some methods for learning mental math and they are based on how computers work, too.

Older paradigms of education need to be tossed and the methods associate with them, too. The whole idea of school and classroom has to be replaced. One shoe fits all approaches are inefficient and actually destructive rather than constructive.