What I’ve found is that it is far more important to teach parents, teachers, and students how to assess interest and ability as early as possible because it’s so much easier to teach high level concepts in the context of something you’re actually interested in. I tied my love of being obscure, with my love of computers, and languages, but I floundered for almost 8 years after high school trying to figure that out.

The older you are, the harder it becomes to take advantage of career options. Knowing the truth about what your options are at the earliest will do more to open doors of opportunity than this vaguely hidden marketing scheme. This is just setting up Information Systems (an already precarious industry) to be the next law degree, or mba when pretty much all of them are worthless in the current model. And that’s not even touching the whole Will.I.Am or Chris Bosch aspect of e campaign.

Teach kids how to learn, and how to evaluate accurately what they can produce comfortably to make a living. Don’t teach them how to pick the shiniest, highest paying major. This project is simply more of the same bandaids that won’t fix the gaping wound that is education in general, but post-secondary education in particular in this country.

“Schools with more than 1,000 students would no longer be required to have librarians or librarian assistants.

Schools would no longer be required to have counselors, and counselors’ caseloads would no longer be capped.

Teachers could be assigned to unlimited classes outside their subject area, and high school teachers could be assigned an extra class without pay. There would be no limit on amount of consecutive time taught in a school day.

There would be no limit on class size. (Current limits are 30 for the lower grades and 33 for the upper grades, large class sizes by anyone’s measure.)”
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/school_files/No-seniority–No-water-fountains–More-on-the-contract-proposal.html

Also starting program that is like Teach for America but with STEM majors. Major corporations such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc will pay for students graduate school and they teach MS/HS either during graduate school or after for 2 years. Once those 2 years are up they go to work for the company who sponsored them.

I think “coding” is catching on as a term over “programming” because it sounds less formal, and there is a (misplaced) bad rep for “hacking”. There’s also this really misplaced fear that all these programming jobs are being outsourced. Some are. Most aren’t. I think that will change if we don’t get our act together with education in the next 20 years, but there are a lot of people retiring and nobody to fill the ranks right now. It is wide open for a geek with some social skills.

There’s also a big split between “coding” and “computer science”. Anybody can code. Literally, if you have the capability to communicate clearly in a language you can make a line of code work. The leap to science is learning the most efficient way to solve a problem, and even more importantly learning which problems can only be solved by brute force (which takes too long), and how to get the best approximation of a perfect solution with the time you have. I see a lot of people with good coding skills, but no clue about the science. Those people make decent money but never leave the bottom tier. A deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, logic, and set theory will take you to the next level.

Great resources from the Java world are http://www.greenfoot.org/door and http://www.alice.org/index.php

They are both geared toward kids, but completely appropriate for adults who want to try. I’ve watched 12 year olds build games and animations in two days with these, more than once. Greenfoot is more geared to nuts and bolts coding – Alice is more about building animations and has an extra level of abstraction there, but it’s still great, especially for kids who are more visual or have problems with dyslexia that make typing harder.