ehh. id push for tech literacy but not this. It would guarantee that id keep my job so i have an incentive to support it, but i dont think this is the right class for everyone. it should be an elective at most.
PART 2:
the kids who were able to keep up with the non gameified lesson were the 2 kids who had experience. and the 4 who were excited about the class and interested. this was in a lot of about 25 kids aged 12-16. the rest of the kids saw this as a 2 hour waste of time. the way this camp worked was the kids were made to pick classes for each day. The popular fun classes: physics (played with mini-catapults all day), art, cooking, sports, rockets (more just launching balloons if anything), etc classes filled up FAST as everyone wanted to schedule those. so thats why i had a good chunk of kids who were made to take my class because the other ones were at capacity. they didnt turn on their schedule fast enough so they were made to do the classes that had vacancy.
it is undeniable that computers are not a broad appeal. The average kid (not us) when given a paper to pick what classes, will see CS and skip it because it dont sound that fun nor does it sound easy. its hella fun for you and me and the few kids who really like it, but its hard to fill a room of 25 forced to participate people and expect them to enjoy it. especially if its not a gamified introduction.
note the reason that the gamefied version of the lesson wasnt used is because that lesson plan is designed for "day of code" classes where i ahve 1 school day (~7 hours or so) to teach. this summer camp gave me over 40 hours. this was multi week camp 4 days a week type of thing. Simply the gameified lessons dont last that long so i curated a longer lesson plan. fyi, it was a intro to CS -> build a pc -> python class, in that order, over the weeks.
it was not a good class as i felt i couldnt spend my time with the kids who wanted to learn, as i was mostly trying to control the about 60% of the class that was only put in my room because there was no where else for them.
I fear that if we push for CS, AI, & coding classes in schools, this problem will get even worse! and for what? the very few converts that transfer from the not-interested -> interested group? it hardly happens! all making everyone would do it make it WORSE for the talented kids. I mostly teach opt-in classes so when im there the majority of the class is happy to participate. this means i have time to come and help people with their questions and i almost never have to go and tell a kid to get off tiktok. if these people get what they want and put CS as a mandatory class, it will HURT me as a teacher because i will have to spend more time policing the class to keep everyone on task. Also it will HURT the kids who are interested because now they will have to wait longer for me to come and help them, because im busy dealing with the kids in the back watching porn.
This will make it worse for teachers and for the interested students!
now, as for computer literacy. we should mandate that and make it the most boring class ever... which is kinda fair cuz its a boring stuff to teach. but it should be forced because these kids need to learn how to use a computer or at the least know what a URL is ffs!
but thats a but off topic. Anyways. yea. not a fan of this article. I dont think the people who wrote it are bad or anything. i think they are like you and me. we see the world with rose colored glasses where computers are exciting and a job. we want to share our enjoyment. however lets take off those rose glasses and look at the students because they are what really matters. They see computers as a tool and have no reason to learn more.
Lets not make another shitty chemistry class thats required. Lets have kids choose if they want to participate or not.
cant fit comment into this block, will have to break it up.
<br>
PART 1:
here in the USA we have hour of code and other introductory classes. these are classes that everyone participates in. There are many kids who simply arent interested in computers at all. Most of them find their phone the peak of technology. these are the kids that will not follow along with the lesson and group with with the other non-participatory kids to mess around the entire class.
because some of these day long mandatory classes are for everyone you find very quickly that most of the time the class is broken down into: 10% that are interested and have some experience. 20% that are interested but have no experience. 25% that dont really care but they see it as a "free day" away from their normal classes. 25% that dont care at all and just misuse the provided computers to play games or watch youtube. and the remaining % that simply just dont want to be there.
This rough stats are from personal experience in over 5 school districts at 30+ locations (im a traveling teacher). The times that i will have GREAT experience is during opt-in classes where the kids chose to be there, or computer camps that are during the summer/ after school. At these sessions the kids either enrolled themself through the school, or their parents provided the $ to attend the camp. These are the kids that will be closer to 40% has experience and is interested 40% thats interested but has no experience, and the remaining 20% were sent their by their parents over the summer because the mom got tired of having their kids in the house the whole day. (i live in arizona and during the summer it is inhabitable outside so summer camps are the most common way to "get rid of your kids" for a few days a week).
With both of these statistics for the mandatory & volunteer classes, these stats will change over time. Some of the kids who were messing around end up finding a interest in atleast something, but at the same time, some of the kids who were interested but had no experience wound up finding out how much work it can actually be and shift themself into the not interested or misuse the computers group.
This is for moth middle and high schoolers so its not an age thing. Computer science, coding, ai, robotics, it, pc builds, and other classes ive all tought and i assure you that making the kids learn a very specific skill, when they dont want to, results in you spending MOST of your class time not teaching... but rather making rounds to correct the kids who are doing no work, or just messing around on the tech. Simply i spend less time actually teaching the kids that want to learn. My goal should be to educate, and to go around and help kids who have bugs that need fixxed, or have other questions, not telling kids to get off their phones.
There is also the real world use case that needs to be considered. Most people do not need to know how AI works, they can simply use it as a tool. This is already what most of the kids do so its not even something that needs to be taught as they already know. as for computer science its the same thing. These kids dont care about how a computer works, and if we teach them, they will have no use for that knowledge. Similar to my chemistry class, i have never used anything from that class irl.
What i think the kids do need to learn is computer literacy. With these kids growing up on phones and Chromebooks, they dont know what a file is. everything is abstracted in the cloud and they dont understand what local storage is. One of the MOST common problems i have is that kids dont know how to go to a website. im not kidding. they know how to google a website, and thats all. If i give them a specific url, like write it on the board... they will for real, google the first half of the url, skip the .com and not include the /specificpage. I wish i was joking. This causes lots of problems because if i give them examplesite.net/specificpage they dont go to the page i want because they google "examplesite" then click on the first link. that is of course examplesite.net/home. then they wander why it looks different then what i am showing on the projector. These kids dont know how to do anything on a computer individually yet either. untill i "train" them over the first few weeks; if i ask them to fond something specific they open the stupid google play store on their Chromebook and look for an app! this happened just last month. I wanted them to download a git repo as a zip file then extract. The first question i was asked was what app to get to download github zip's.
I have plenty of other examples but it all simplifies down to computer literacy should be a mandatory class. Its not as fun as a CS class, but man is it NEEDED. When you and me look at this article we feel different. this is out passion, something we enjoy and we also go it as a job. We want to share what we enjoy. we also understand that education about our hobbies can be very useful to some people. Because you and me see the world dominated by computers we think that: man, computers do EVERYTHING in the world, they control almost all aspects of our lives. everyone should understand at least the basics of what is going on. While this is a nice thought its problematic because it dont end up becoming reality. Most people get along just fine using tech in their day to day lives without understanding the CS fundamentals underneath it. While it might be handy to know, its just as useful as my chemistry class was. I was required to take that class and it was a waste of my time. If it was an elective i wouldnt have choose it. However if i did have an interest in chem, and elective would have given me the ability to learn if if i wished so. This is the way that CS, AI, Coding classes should be. opt-in. If we look at other things that we also interact with all the time: automotive and medicine, the argument could be also made that those should be required classes because they are such an important part of out society. Im sure there are people also requesting that they do infact be made part of a curriculum. but i would be hostile to learning about meds because im not that interested. we dont need to encourage kids to move into a medicine field when they grow up, and we also dont need to push them into computers when they grow up.
hell, and while were at it, lets not make chem a required class to FFS!
just because you and me love computers, and because we didnt have computer classes in our schools, dont mean that we should require everyone to take it. I think this will cause people to be adverse to the topic and make people dislike the class. We need to look at the reality and understand that based on my rough % from earlier that a decision like this wouldnt be popular as kids that are truly interested are less common then you think. While there should be resources (and there are plenty) for kids who are interested, it shouldn't be mandatory.
have you had better %'s with any students you have taught, or have you only taught to students who choose to be their. If thats not the case i recommend you try teaching a manditory "hour of code" or "day of code" like we have here in the US. These classes are very introductory and are often gamified. why are they gamified? because if they wernt and even large % of the interested kids would shift into the non-participatory group. why do i know this? because ive ran a manditory summer camp
ehh. id push for tech literacy but not this. It would guarantee that id keep my job so i have an incentive to support it, but i dont think this is the right class for everyone. it should be an elective at most.
why do you think this isn't for everyone?
let me know what your experience is though :)
PART 2: the kids who were able to keep up with the non gameified lesson were the 2 kids who had experience. and the 4 who were excited about the class and interested. this was in a lot of about 25 kids aged 12-16. the rest of the kids saw this as a 2 hour waste of time. the way this camp worked was the kids were made to pick classes for each day. The popular fun classes: physics (played with mini-catapults all day), art, cooking, sports, rockets (more just launching balloons if anything), etc classes filled up FAST as everyone wanted to schedule those. so thats why i had a good chunk of kids who were made to take my class because the other ones were at capacity. they didnt turn on their schedule fast enough so they were made to do the classes that had vacancy. it is undeniable that computers are not a broad appeal. The average kid (not us) when given a paper to pick what classes, will see CS and skip it because it dont sound that fun nor does it sound easy. its hella fun for you and me and the few kids who really like it, but its hard to fill a room of 25 forced to participate people and expect them to enjoy it. especially if its not a gamified introduction. note the reason that the gamefied version of the lesson wasnt used is because that lesson plan is designed for "day of code" classes where i ahve 1 school day (~7 hours or so) to teach. this summer camp gave me over 40 hours. this was multi week camp 4 days a week type of thing. Simply the gameified lessons dont last that long so i curated a longer lesson plan. fyi, it was a intro to CS -> build a pc -> python class, in that order, over the weeks. it was not a good class as i felt i couldnt spend my time with the kids who wanted to learn, as i was mostly trying to control the about 60% of the class that was only put in my room because there was no where else for them. I fear that if we push for CS, AI, & coding classes in schools, this problem will get even worse! and for what? the very few converts that transfer from the not-interested -> interested group? it hardly happens! all making everyone would do it make it WORSE for the talented kids. I mostly teach opt-in classes so when im there the majority of the class is happy to participate. this means i have time to come and help people with their questions and i almost never have to go and tell a kid to get off tiktok. if these people get what they want and put CS as a mandatory class, it will HURT me as a teacher because i will have to spend more time policing the class to keep everyone on task. Also it will HURT the kids who are interested because now they will have to wait longer for me to come and help them, because im busy dealing with the kids in the back watching porn. This will make it worse for teachers and for the interested students! now, as for computer literacy. we should mandate that and make it the most boring class ever... which is kinda fair cuz its a boring stuff to teach. but it should be forced because these kids need to learn how to use a computer or at the least know what a URL is ffs! but thats a but off topic. Anyways. yea. not a fan of this article. I dont think the people who wrote it are bad or anything. i think they are like you and me. we see the world with rose colored glasses where computers are exciting and a job. we want to share our enjoyment. however lets take off those rose glasses and look at the students because they are what really matters. They see computers as a tool and have no reason to learn more. Lets not make another shitty chemistry class thats required. Lets have kids choose if they want to participate or not.
cant fit comment into this block, will have to break it up. <br> PART 1: here in the USA we have hour of code and other introductory classes. these are classes that everyone participates in. There are many kids who simply arent interested in computers at all. Most of them find their phone the peak of technology. these are the kids that will not follow along with the lesson and group with with the other non-participatory kids to mess around the entire class. because some of these day long mandatory classes are for everyone you find very quickly that most of the time the class is broken down into: 10% that are interested and have some experience. 20% that are interested but have no experience. 25% that dont really care but they see it as a "free day" away from their normal classes. 25% that dont care at all and just misuse the provided computers to play games or watch youtube. and the remaining % that simply just dont want to be there. This rough stats are from personal experience in over 5 school districts at 30+ locations (im a traveling teacher). The times that i will have GREAT experience is during opt-in classes where the kids chose to be there, or computer camps that are during the summer/ after school. At these sessions the kids either enrolled themself through the school, or their parents provided the $ to attend the camp. These are the kids that will be closer to 40% has experience and is interested 40% thats interested but has no experience, and the remaining 20% were sent their by their parents over the summer because the mom got tired of having their kids in the house the whole day. (i live in arizona and during the summer it is inhabitable outside so summer camps are the most common way to "get rid of your kids" for a few days a week). With both of these statistics for the mandatory & volunteer classes, these stats will change over time. Some of the kids who were messing around end up finding a interest in atleast something, but at the same time, some of the kids who were interested but had no experience wound up finding out how much work it can actually be and shift themself into the not interested or misuse the computers group. This is for moth middle and high schoolers so its not an age thing. Computer science, coding, ai, robotics, it, pc builds, and other classes ive all tought and i assure you that making the kids learn a very specific skill, when they dont want to, results in you spending MOST of your class time not teaching... but rather making rounds to correct the kids who are doing no work, or just messing around on the tech. Simply i spend less time actually teaching the kids that want to learn. My goal should be to educate, and to go around and help kids who have bugs that need fixxed, or have other questions, not telling kids to get off their phones. There is also the real world use case that needs to be considered. Most people do not need to know how AI works, they can simply use it as a tool. This is already what most of the kids do so its not even something that needs to be taught as they already know. as for computer science its the same thing. These kids dont care about how a computer works, and if we teach them, they will have no use for that knowledge. Similar to my chemistry class, i have never used anything from that class irl. What i think the kids do need to learn is computer literacy. With these kids growing up on phones and Chromebooks, they dont know what a file is. everything is abstracted in the cloud and they dont understand what local storage is. One of the MOST common problems i have is that kids dont know how to go to a website. im not kidding. they know how to google a website, and thats all. If i give them a specific url, like write it on the board... they will for real, google the first half of the url, skip the .com and not include the /specificpage. I wish i was joking. This causes lots of problems because if i give them examplesite.net/specificpage they dont go to the page i want because they google "examplesite" then click on the first link. that is of course examplesite.net/home. then they wander why it looks different then what i am showing on the projector. These kids dont know how to do anything on a computer individually yet either. untill i "train" them over the first few weeks; if i ask them to fond something specific they open the stupid google play store on their Chromebook and look for an app! this happened just last month. I wanted them to download a git repo as a zip file then extract. The first question i was asked was what app to get to download github zip's. I have plenty of other examples but it all simplifies down to computer literacy should be a mandatory class. Its not as fun as a CS class, but man is it NEEDED. When you and me look at this article we feel different. this is out passion, something we enjoy and we also go it as a job. We want to share what we enjoy. we also understand that education about our hobbies can be very useful to some people. Because you and me see the world dominated by computers we think that: man, computers do EVERYTHING in the world, they control almost all aspects of our lives. everyone should understand at least the basics of what is going on. While this is a nice thought its problematic because it dont end up becoming reality. Most people get along just fine using tech in their day to day lives without understanding the CS fundamentals underneath it. While it might be handy to know, its just as useful as my chemistry class was. I was required to take that class and it was a waste of my time. If it was an elective i wouldnt have choose it. However if i did have an interest in chem, and elective would have given me the ability to learn if if i wished so. This is the way that CS, AI, Coding classes should be. opt-in. If we look at other things that we also interact with all the time: automotive and medicine, the argument could be also made that those should be required classes because they are such an important part of out society. Im sure there are people also requesting that they do infact be made part of a curriculum. but i would be hostile to learning about meds because im not that interested. we dont need to encourage kids to move into a medicine field when they grow up, and we also dont need to push them into computers when they grow up. hell, and while were at it, lets not make chem a required class to FFS! just because you and me love computers, and because we didnt have computer classes in our schools, dont mean that we should require everyone to take it. I think this will cause people to be adverse to the topic and make people dislike the class. We need to look at the reality and understand that based on my rough % from earlier that a decision like this wouldnt be popular as kids that are truly interested are less common then you think. While there should be resources (and there are plenty) for kids who are interested, it shouldn't be mandatory. have you had better %'s with any students you have taught, or have you only taught to students who choose to be their. If thats not the case i recommend you try teaching a manditory "hour of code" or "day of code" like we have here in the US. These classes are very introductory and are often gamified. why are they gamified? because if they wernt and even large % of the interested kids would shift into the non-participatory group. why do i know this? because ive ran a manditory summer camp