Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is teaching his own kids how to code
http://pando.com/2014/02/25/secretary-of-education-arne-duncan-is-teaching-his-own-kids-how-to-code/
Ashton Kutcher’s doing it. Will.i.am’s doing it. Chris Bosh’s doing it. Britain’s doing it. And now, US Secretary of State Arne Duncan and his kids are doing it.
Everyone’s learning to code!
As Pando has previously reported, billionaire backers are funding a huge lobbying effort — Code.org — to get programming taught in schools. But, while this organization is painstakingly chipping away at state policies, in some cases district by district, it turns out the Educator in Chief was already on board.
Arne Duncan said as much during an edtech privacy summit today where he announced federal guidelines on how to treat educational data collected from students (more on that tomorrow). As he explored the pros and cons of technology in the classroom (pro: empowers teachers, con: invasion of privacy), he let a personal detail slip.
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There is plenty of bug-ridden software in the world written by a large pool of mediocre programmers.
There is more to software development than just typing code. There is more to software development than just learning a few algorithms.
Software development consists of understanding the application, designing the program, selecting and understanding the applicable tools (programming languages, databases, etc.), designing user interfaces, testing, debugging, documenting, and maintenance.
As a professional programmer, I saw (and was paid to "fix"
a lot of bad software. I also had the opportunity to code or maintain some really good software. A lot of large projects were second or third attempts to get the software to work correctly. A lot of commercial software had "old" bugs that were difficult to find.
A lot of software had problems because the manager responsible for its development and maintenance had limited skills in software development.
Learning some programming skills is fine so long as the learner doesn't get a misconception that the apparent ease of writing a simple utility for personal use "proves" that it is just as "easy" to write a program of considerable size and complexity.