Tag: learn

Anthony Wing Kosner, Contributor

Monday night, President Obama made time in his State of the Union Address to address our national deficit in STEM education:

“Tonight, I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy.  We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math—the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”

For those in the learn-to-code movement, this was a welcome validation of their efforts. Codecademy’s digital literacy advocate Douglas Rushkoff tells me, “Honestly, as I listened to Obama speak I thought the words Codecademy were about to come out of his mouth!”

via Can Obama Convince High Schools To Teach Kids To Code? – Forbes.

Anthony Wing Kosner, Contributor

So, do you really have to learn to program to participate in 21st century society? Absolutely not, you can be as analog in your life as you can get away with and still put food on the table. But the significance of code literacy in contemporary culture is about more than personal lifestyle choices. We are all now immersed, if not in code itself, then in the effects of code on everything around us.

We have even reframed our conception of the analog vs. the digital. Are our “codes” just simplifications that attempt to describe nature, or is nature itself the playing out of “codes” that are complex beyond our understanding? It’s an important philosophical question, but in practical terms, we manipulate our abstractions through programming at whatever level of approximation we are working at.

via Learn To Code #2: The Many Reasons Why We Must Program (And The Few Why Not) – Forbes.