> If you took a random person you passed on a busy London street at lunch time, how much better do you think they would be able to do their job if they knew how to program?
How many would benefit from learning more physics, microbiology, or reading more Shakspeare? I would say it is about the same.
For example a specific example from the article is Excel. I might not like and would never use it personally but it is useful to teach it to kids. They can just use it to track their personal finances to start with. A lot of businesses use it. Knowing how to automate things in can be a great timesaver. Heck, just knowing that it is possible to automate things in it using scripting would be good to know.
There is game programming, and that can be used to attract kids to go and study programming in depth. I think we would benefit as a society from kids wanting to go into CS more than wanting to go into Communications or English majors. Then there is the whole web aspect of it.
Then just basic literacy of using the web & the privacy implications are very important to know. Network privacy and security is one of those things along law, personal finance & propaganda techniques that should be taught first and foremost in schools because those are probably going to be important in anyone's lives -- more so than ancient history or even learning Visual Basic programming. But it seems important & practical subjects like that are excluded from our (American) education system, not sure about the British one...
How many would benefit from learning more physics, microbiology, or reading more Shakspeare? I would say it is about the same.
For example a specific example from the article is Excel. I might not like and would never use it personally but it is useful to teach it to kids. They can just use it to track their personal finances to start with. A lot of businesses use it. Knowing how to automate things in can be a great timesaver. Heck, just knowing that it is possible to automate things in it using scripting would be good to know.
There is game programming, and that can be used to attract kids to go and study programming in depth. I think we would benefit as a society from kids wanting to go into CS more than wanting to go into Communications or English majors. Then there is the whole web aspect of it.
Then just basic literacy of using the web & the privacy implications are very important to know. Network privacy and security is one of those things along law, personal finance & propaganda techniques that should be taught first and foremost in schools because those are probably going to be important in anyone's lives -- more so than ancient history or even learning Visual Basic programming. But it seems important & practical subjects like that are excluded from our (American) education system, not sure about the British one...