G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:
> 
> I think it is a little more complicated:
> 
> 1. Hobby or professional?
> 
> Hardly any professional can imagine how to do his/her job without a good
> computer.
> Mastering computerprograms as tools and integrating them efficently in a
> professional setting is more and more part of the new professional skills
> and lot of companies earn money to teach these skills...
> 
> If you use a computer for fun it becomes one of these time consuming
> childisch games like Fishing, Hunting, Football. In these settings it is the
> user who sets his own targets and rewards: these differ from person to
> person. Reading a manual is cheating, first making a plan makes it look like
> work etc..
> 
> 2. Tool or Toy?
> 
> Some people want to realize things with computers, nice and quick: they
> (for)sees the results and hate these clumsy machines, which never do what
> you WANT them to do, spoiling your valuable time.. Hit Return, You can count
> on that!!
> 
> If you see it as a toy, it is part of the game: who wants to solve to easy
> puzzles?
> (If I go to the internet in freetime, a wonder about all these things You
> can find on the internet for free, but looking for information about a
> product and finding a place in the neigbourhood where I can buy it makes me
> - on that moment - more and more a computer-hater..
> 
> More women are (thought to be?) users, more men still want to play games?
> 
> 3. What is the use?
> What is the sense of learning computer-programming-skills? Do you become
> isolated when you cannot write programs? In the Eighties some people wrote
> books about that, nowadays more people say that these machines should be
> more user-friendly, hidden in everyday life: Programming is for nerds and
> other fossiles, less and less secundary school-children choose for technical
> skills, boys too.
> (Teaching students more abstract thinking skills by the tool "programming",
> so not programming as goal itself, did even disappear from the educational
> front.)
> 
> 4. Time is money, so can you proof that it pays off if you theach children
> programming instead of, yes instead of what?

But on the positive side, when kids 4-5 years old learn all names and 
stages of Pokemon without parents or teachers involvement proves that
the potential
of learning seemingly unimportant knowledge is there :-)
Karl
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Mark Guzdial [mailto:guzdial at cc.gatech.edu]
> > Sent: maandag 6 augustus 2001 19:43
> > To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> > Subject: Re: Computers in school
> >
> >
> > >
> > >I like Alan's quote very much (it is on my website -
> > >http://www.toontalk.com/English/adultask.htm ). My question
> > is why after 17
> > >years do so few people understand that that is what is so
> > special about
> > >computer programming. Why are there so few actively trying
> > to spread the
> > >power and joy of programming to the wider world?  Why is it
> > such a hard
> > >sell?
> >
> > In my opinion, Ken, the answer to that question has got to be on the
> > level of a Grand Challenge.  Why is programming so hard?  (And
> > similarly: Why are so many willing to move kids towards computers as
> > appliances but not as media?)
> >
> > At GaTech, we recently started a bunch of assessments of our students
> > and found that even 40% of our 2nd Semester students couldn't write a
> > dozen lines of Java code (insert and delete of a linked list) when
> > given the class definition and method headers, a compiler they knew,
> > and 90 minutes.  I've mentioned these assessments on this list
> > previously.
> >
> > Over last Spring, a group of us did a similar study at GaTech,
> > another US institution, one in the UK, and one in Poland.  The
> > problem was building an RPN or infix calculator (different problems
> > with different data sets).  We did our meta-analyses last month. End
> > result: Average grade was 25%.  (This'll be appearing in the ACM
> > SIGCSE Bulletin soon.)
> >
> > What's amazing is how few people are studying this.  At a time when
> > so many (e.g., the PCAST report) point to the importance of
> > information technology and education about it for the health of the
> > economy, research into CS Education has virtually disappeared.  The
> > last Empirical Studies of Programmers workshop was cancelled due to
> > lack of submissions!
> >
> > I think that we have clues about why it's so hard for so many, and
> > how to make it easier.  Amy Bruckman showed that making programming
> > socially cool (in Moose Crossing) made it possible for lots of kids
> > to learn to program. The recent American Association of University
> > Women report pointed out that women (and many others, I'll bet) are
> > drawn away from IT because we make CS classes as boring as possible.
> > Motivation is important, and showing that computers can do
> > interesting and creative things is critical to making programming
> > learnable.  The Squeak tile approach of using multiple parallel
> > scripts (similar to the approaches in Logo Mindstorms and StarLogo)
> > to avoid explicit conditionals or iteration is a fascinating
> > direction to explore.
> >
> > Seymour Papert has written that it's inherent in school's structure
> > to avoid revolution, and that programming will never become
> > integrated into school curricula because of that (ref: Journal of the
> > Learning Sciences article last year, and in the Children's Machine
> > and Connected Family books).  I hope he's wrong, but I think the
> > small number of people pushing on this problem makes it more likely
> > that he'll be right.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > --------------------------
> > Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta,
> > GA 30332-0280
> > Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
> > Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
> > (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
> > http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
> >
> >