Social discussion of CS in K-12

[Charles Schultz <sacrophyte AT gmail.com>]

Good morning,

As a quick tangent, does anyone ever blog/opine or otherwise summarize what awesome discussions you all have on Tuesday nights? I am totally missing out! :)

I have really been enjoying Todd Lash's tweets, highlighting various quotes from those around the net who have great insights into how kids learn. I also happen to follow slashdot.org, a news aggregator on some computer topics. Recently, there were two articles side-by-side that caught the attention of my "education attenae":

• http://developers-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/09/23/1534236/the-site-that-teaches-you-to-code-well-enough-to-get-a-job
  
  
• http://ask-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/09/23/1653210/ask-slashdot-finding-a-job-after-completing-computer-science-phd

The first is significant because it falls in line with what you all have been talking about in regards to eToys, Scratch, Kodable, code.org, etc. The featured website is a bit rough and has a little learning curve in and of itself, but the premise is very exciting, taking yet another step to bring the real world into the realm of education.

Why do I say "bring the real world into the realm of education"? Isn't that what "education" is supposed to do in the first place? The second article highlights how far astray our upper-level "education" has gone; here we have a PhD computer scientist who says, quote "The PhD was on a very technical topic that has very little practical application and so working on it does not seem to count as experience." Ouch.

I am excited about what CTRL-SHIFT is doing because you guys are transforming the fundamentals of education itself. At least, this is my belief - if you think otherwise, please let me know. *grin*

Travis, I really appreciated your "Why school sucks" paper. Hopefully, the fruits of your collective labor will transition school from sucking to school being essential, fun, immersive and life-changing.

One more last obersvation. I recently started playing around with svg in _javascript_ and HTML5. "Web programming" is getting more and more powerful, achieving a fine balance between robust features and ease of coding. So much so that I can now make the observation that coding in eToys/Scratch is almost like coding in HTML - there are but a few small steps between the two. Very exciting! :)

--
Charles Schultz