When careers don't last much longer than primary school, play is the new training As we move into the mid-21st century - what historians will probably note as the Dawn of the Connected Era - our emphasis on what’s important to teach children has changed. Where once we tried to cram kids heads full of facts, these days we tend to favor the capacity to find an answer. That’s only viable because those kids ( …
I was about to make a comment on how I'd bet none of those wonderful examples given in the article were written using any of the examples given in the article; but then I thought about it and decided not to. Instead of a snarky remark, I'll make a long-winded point.
It is true that I myself learn better by *doing* than through long readings of books (although I still enjoy said reading, if only to pick up useless trivia). But given the previous... the problem is that by going down this path we run the risk of creating a generation of "doers" rather than "thinkers". Bear with me for a while.
I have met some wonderful doers in my 20-odd years doing computing. But with the odd exception, not a single one could tell you "why" things worked the way they did, or even "how". They just did. And I'm not talking about "why is electron tunneling essential for the electronics which make your TV work", but "how does an internal combustion engine work". And when things went wrong, they were completely lost because they had none of the theory to fall back on. Which is fine if all you want is a Java coder (for example), but not if you want an analyst. Hell, I went back to University to do a post-grad and mistakenly enrolled in the wrong course ("Introduction to programming in Java"): I thought I was enrolling in "Introduction to: Programming in Java", what I got into was "Introduction to programming (in Java)". A small, but significant difference - and the *lecturer*, when asked, could not tell his students why arrays start at 0 instead of 1. Here is a University Lecturer, who is supposed to teach programming to his students, and could not even teach the difference between an Offset and an Index (or the fact it was a legacy of trying to lure C programmers to this new-fangled language). Nor did they ever teach about garbage collection and why it was such a good thing it had been automated in newer languages.
So no, I don't think we should fully go down the "learn by doing" path - or else we might end up with a bunch of kids unable to do simple maths without a calculator or internet access to Goo- Oh... wait...
This is especially true in any technical profession like engineering etc. You need to know the basics your field is based on (or at least know that they exist). Otherwise you are lost as soon anything unexpected happens. If you have no idea of how and why things work, you won't be able to fix them properly. Or worse, you might not even notice that they are broken.
Scratch is good to get Kids interested in programming, but if they think Scratch IS programming, you've given them the wrong message. Dragging and dropping boxes is fun, but at some point, if you want to be fully competent, you need to see the code generated in the background, and understand what it's doing. Other than an individual's personal interest, does Scratch DRIVE that desire? Or are kids happy with the drag-n-drop interface and leave it at that?
The world doesn't need a generation of Scratch "programmers", but if Scratch sparks an interest in more kids to become programmers, then it is of benefit.
I'm not so worried about what tools we use to create Scratch and the like, I'm worried about WHO will create the said tools. We rely heavily on JVMs, compilers, interpreters, etc..., and we need competent people to write those. The language you use is only as good as the system that turns it into an executable. Hopefully "easy to use" languages like Scratch, JavaScript, Python, etc... aren't having an adverse effect on the future engineers we will rely on to design and maintain the tools surrounding those languages.
"That school of thought - Constructivism - insists that we really only learn by doing, and, specifically, learn through a process of discovery when we’re thrust into an environment we don’t fully understand. (Emphasis by me.
That happens on the day we are born, and it ends on the day we die. Deal with it.
We start with a headline which suggests the article will be about employment training in 21st century.
After a quick puff on the crack pipe, the article jitters on about trends in education, even though it peaked 10 years ago, and the pendulum has swung back to being far MORE exam focused and conservative.
Next the article, which clearly hasn't taken its ADHD drugs, runs off distracted by a squirrel, and starts talking about blockchains, and finally introduces an alt-coin.
Finally after failing to to tie these disparate trains of thought together, collapses on the sofa surrounded by empty beer cans.
"Where once we tried to cram kids heads full of facts, these days we tend to favor the capacity to find an answer."
"an answer". And there is your problem. Teachers aren't teaching "the answer", and how to get to it anymore. Nor are they teaching kids how to figure it out for themselves. We're not teaching kids the three Rs anymore ... we're teaching them how to fondle a so-called "smart" phone.
Humans have stopped evolving. We might be doomed as a race.
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