Counterpoint: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic Remain the Most Critical Tools for Future Success
William Zhou, Canadian businessman and founder of Chalk.com, has argued that while children should receive an education in coding, mandatory elementary and high school classes are not the way to go about it. He maintained that the resources needed to offer the classes in the first place and then ensure that the teachers in charge are properly trained in the subject just are not there yet. He fears that if authorities push for mandatory classes, offerings will be rudimentary and dull and end up turning off potential coding enthusiasts rather than encouraging them. According to Wendy Powley, a research associate in computing at Queen’s University, only one-third of Ontario high schools currently offer even one computer science class.
A study conducted in several California schools in 2008 illustrated the potential for coding classes at the elementary level to increase racial, gender, and economic divides between students instead of improving it. In the book Stuck in the Shallow End, researchers show that quality of computer science programming varied considerably across their area of study. At more affluent schools, there was greater access to quality instruction, and even in the school with better programming, minority students were underrepresented in those classes and received less encouragement from teachers to pursue computer science. Mark Guzdial, a computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an expert in computer science education, believes more resources should be allocated to improving the teaching of basics subjects that are accessible to all students such as reading, writing, and math.
Powley told CBC News that she has seen a rise in the number of students entering computer science at Queen’s University, but most of those students are responding to a growing market for computer-based skills rather than computer science classes they took previously, undermining the basis for mandatory coding classes in public schools nationwide.
Point: Learning to Code Is an Invaluable Tool for a Future Based in Technology
According to a 2010 Research Council of Canada report, women make up only 22 per cent of the natural sciences and engineering workforce, and women are similarly under-represented in STEM fields in North American universities. Heather Payne, the founder of Ladies Learning Code and its offshoot, Girls Learning Code, believes that teaching girls and women to code in ways tailored to their learning needs will encourage more of them to pursue computer science later in life. She told the Toronto Star that teaching girls to code will expand the pool of people with the skills to build the technology used every day by a huge number of people, leading to new technology that more accurately reflects the needs of its users.
Jeanette M. Wing, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, believes that the skills imparted by a basic education in computer science are relevant across a wide range of disciplines. In her department’s magazine, the Link, she writes that an education in computer science teaches computational thinking — a form of problem solving that uses abstraction, or the ability to create general principles from specific circumstances — that can be applied to a broad range of disciplines, including biology, chemistry, linguistics, neuroscience, and photography.
Coding education is also becoming more and more accessible. In 2014, England implemented a nationwide set of computer science curricula at the K — 12 level, requiring all schoolchildren to learn the basics of coding. In order to support teachers all over the world who want to bring coding into their classrooms, organizations such as Code.org and the Raspberry Pi Foundation provide free resources on their websites to help improve the quality of the coding education children receive, which could enable even schools with budgetary constraints to provide their students with access to computer science courses.