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From: "Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com>
Newsgroups: comp.programming
Subject: Re: What do they teach in school today?
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 14:59:31 -0500
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"James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:msfioj$i8c$1@dont-email.me...
>
> "J. Clarke" <j.clarke.873638@gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:MPG.30401c0c36885213989ac3@news.eternal-september.org...
>>I was talking to a recent computer science graduate today.  He had never
>> seen C, never seen Fortran, had no notion of a shell script or batch
>> file, had never heard of ActiveX or .net or gcc.
>
> What *had* they taught him? There must have been something.
>
>> So what does somebody spend four years doing in a modern university
>> computer science program?
>
> AFAIK from online university courses I have perused universities do teach 
> programming properly (though maybe not as diversely as they could) but 
> schools (i.e. for up to 16 or 18 years of age) seem to have abandoned 
> proper computer education completely. ISTM that schools teach children how 
> to *use* computers, especially computer applications, rather than how to 
> control a computer; they focus on things like spreadsheets and word 
> processors. They are probably more keen to ensure that kids are not 
> frightened by computers, or perhaps it is the teachers' own fear that they 
> are trying to overcome.
>
> From things I have seen on TV recently it seems that when educators do 
> teach kids to program it is using things like Scratch which allows 
> programs to be composed by dragging constructs and dropping them in a gui. 
> There's an example of it at
>
>  https://scratch.mit.edu/
>

There is another "drag and drop" language from the University of California 
at Berkeley called Snap:

http://snap.berkeley.edu/

-- 

numerist at aquaporin4 dot com