Re: Do you need a degree to...
I'm sorry, but good grief, your idea of computer science sounds terrifyingly like the typical gormless middle manager who's convinced he doesn't need to understand the technical details because he's got a firm hand on the budget.
To be honest, the thing that would most invigorate the entire industry is returning the focus to getting actual value from the work we're doing. Creating something. A real result rather than the hyped up nonsense of improved social media penetration and merry-go-round startups who's only existence seems to be to insert themselves in the middle of a perfectly functional value chain to no good end.
We can create and transform industries with the work we do. We can discover new science and help people live longer, healthier lives. We can deliver outstanding entertainment and we can improve every one of the human senses. We can teach. We can save lives and predict deaths. We can create delightful experiences. We can aid discovery and remember for you. Yet all of these things get lost in the mire of big data projects with no discernible outcome or over-hyped startups with paper-thin business models that boil down to selling more adverts. If you ask people today what computers do for them, they'll tell you Google and Amazon - not for the feats of engineering that uphold those companies, but for the experience of being sold stuff at every point of interaction with a machine. If you want people to be excited about computers, we need to start being excited ourselves, and to throw off the hype around businesses who's only value is coincidental to the actual technology and function being created.
Doctors and lawyers get a good rap because people can see what they do. Make people well, prosecute the guilty, protect the innocent. Computer scientists have lost their identity to telephone sanitisers and snake oil salesmen. Real outcomes excite people, not vague nonsense.
The same applies to kids. They want to see outcomes. In our day, getting an LED flashing was still relatively novel - and a sufficiently big step that moving on to a fully working robot seemed only another small step away. The excitement and imagined possibilities drew us in and we learnt around them. These days, getting a RasPi to light an LED or launch a website is utterly mundane and children are left asking where they can go next. The things that excite them (high quality games, Facebook et. al) seem just as far away as they were when they didn't know how to get a linux partition to boot. The challenge to educators is to get children to a platform where they can achieve things that involve them before having to understand decades worth of technological advancement.