Lottie Dexter should quit – and take the Year of Code board with her

http://adrianshort.org/2014/02/09/lottie-dexter-quit-year-of-code/

by tommorris • 12 years ago

41 31 12 years ago

adrianshort.org

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

The interview is screamingly funny, more so if you're British or otherwise familiar with Jeremy Paxman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7x7GYItzS4

adamnemecek• 12 years ago

Is the moderator really snickering about the uselessness of programming at the very end? Does he live in the 1950's?

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

No, he's being ironic. He's famous for this brusque and dismissive style.

tommorris3• 12 years ago

Yes. Paxman—though he is great at holding politician's feet to the fire—is an Oxbridge old boy who has very little time for science and tech and is very much stuck in the old Two Cultures model of science vs. humanities.

In his mind, there are the privately educated, Oxbridge Classics/PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) crowd who run the world through politics or business, then there are basically not particularly valuable "geeks" or "boffins" who do their bidding on technical matters.

He's great at interviewing Prime Ministers and holding their feet to the fire, but like a lot of journalists, he doesn't really get science and tech stuff.

sync• 12 years ago

Here's a direct link to the start of the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-7...

jchung• 12 years ago

This is outrageous. How was she appointed to her position?

tommorris3• 12 years ago

Easy. She is a young Conservative activist and the government wanted to give her a job.

logn• 12 years ago

I don't think this will do much good. I was forced to take 5 years of Spanish through school. Hardly know how to speak it now. The people who excel are usually driven by their own interest. Nothing makes something miserable like a gov't/school mandate.

sp3322• 12 years ago

Making it visible and accessible is important. Otherwise how would people find out that they really liked Spanish, US Civil War history, or programming?

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

It is visible and accessible. Perhaps not if your only interaction is with the smartphone singularity, but I agree with the OP that programming is largely self-guided.

Making it a compulsory school subject isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is distressing as to how well it'll actually be taught, whether good impressions will be received from it and whether or not it will be deceiving. Schools aren't known for being apt at actually fostering education (but rather routine and rote), much less being engaging.

I have a feeling this will be simply an excuse for the education system to ostensibly appear progressive and forward-thinking, but without actually providing decent resources. An exercise in flaunting that will likely have no actual effect on student impressions, especially not if typical public school teaching methods are employed.

I think that it's better to have no real understanding of coding than no understanding whatsoever.

That and I honestly think system administration is more important for most people. Learning to code without learning sysadmin work and how your environment actually functions is an unfilled gap.

mjn• 12 years ago

I feel the same way about Spanish, but I do think some of my current interest in computation is related to computers in the curriculum when I was younger (sometimes indirectly). Among other things I remember positively: playing with Logo when I was very young; playing some educational games like Oregon Trail; and doing a few assignments in Hypercard in a general computer-literacy course. That one was kind of interesting because it was not officially "programming": we mostly learned how to type, how to use basic office software, how a Mac desktop worked, etc. But somehow someone had thrown Hypercard into the "computer literacy" jumble, probably because it was part of the default Mac ecosystem at the time, and had some buzz. And that started letting us do programming of a sort, which quite a few kids picked up on as being something you could express yourself in, while not being particularly intimidating.

Towards the end of high school I did take AP Computer Science and that was indeed some mixture of stupid and boring. I don't know how much to blame C++ (student questions ended up devolving into being mostly about iostreams) and how much to blame the teacher or curriculum. But that would probably have killed my interest in CS, if Logo and Hypercard hadn't already kindled it (and on my own time, I stumbled across the ability to write mIRC scripts).

philliphaydon• 12 years ago

It does open up doors for kids who were not aware of programming and are now open to develop an interest in it that they may have never had a chance to develop before. It's hard enough getting to the end of school and figuring out what you want to do for a living.

Double_Cast2• 12 years ago

To paraphrase my high school physics teacher:

Yeah, electromagnetism isn't as intuitive as kinematics. But maybe it would be if kids grew up playing with circuits instead of wooden blocks.

Some kids have an aptitude for programming, and some don't. Perhaps initiatives like these will introduce "the discipline that is CS" to some whom otherwise would not have known it exists?

tobych• 12 years ago

Ain't it program, not programme, always?

tommorris3• 12 years ago

No. UK/US difference.

mverwijs2• 12 years ago

Isn't it isn't it, not ain't it?

scotth2• 12 years ago

The interview was fine. She described code as it is. Frankly, it isn't important whether she knows how to code. It isn't her job. She's an example to no one.

All that matters is that the program is properly marketed, and that the teachers are competent.

pfraze• 12 years ago

Mmm, I'm not so sure. She's a spokesperson for code education telling a journalist that it's easy to code, and she doesn't know how. If she has to speak for the program like that, she should understand its learning process.

mverwijs2• 12 years ago

But coding is easy to learn. It is not rocket science. It is merely language and syntax to learn the basics. They teach math without expecting kids to become math-gurus. How is code different?

spamizbad• 12 years ago

I'm amazed at the pace they think they can get teachers up to speed with coding. Learning to code in a few months while working full time, and knowing it well enough to teach others? That doesn't seem like enough time to prepare the teachers.

thesimpsons1022• 12 years ago

she said you can learn to teach in a few minutes :D

scotth2• 12 years ago

I think that was just a slip up. Watch how she acts while answering.

I have leniency for things like that. I'm sure if given the chance she would have a reasonable explanation.

lettergram• 12 years ago

"This gobbly goop will help them build websites.."

edderly• 12 years ago

Anyone vaguely technical would cringe at the Lottie Dexter interview, and the first and easiest reaction is to just bemoan the boneheadedness of government trying to yet another shallow initiative headed by (apparently) shallow people.

Then again, it’s worth considering that the there is enough work to do to just get technical skills on the educational agenda. That requires getting attention, and it just might be that Dexter might be more relatable than a domain expert.

BTW, I think a truly ambitious initiative would be built on free software. With FOSS it's easier to explain how people who know how to code can use those skills to make changes to things that they use rather than just be consumers or specialists.

auvi• 12 years ago

she says "you can pick it up in a day".

jarmitage• 12 years ago

I'd be interested to hear from our friends over the pond how this compares to the Code.org initiative.

It seems to me there are some similarities in the 'boneheadedness' of the approach. What do people think?

Reminder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7045202

youngtaff• 12 years ago

From reading various Twitter conversations it seems there are some egos at play here - read between the lines on some of @thayer's tweets

Lottie Dexter should quit – and take the Year of Code board with her

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