In the Madrid's community have decided to create a new subject so that Madrid students finish the Compulsory Secondary Education knowing how to program unless they know how to make a web page, design an application for the mobile, program a computer game, manage 3D printing and acquire knowledge of robotics. The goal is not only to learn how to use technology, but also to create it and especially to understand how things work and how processes work that make everything work smoothly. The initiative has been presented by the regional president Ignacio González in the Debate of the State of the Region although the news had leaked a week ago.
So the Community of Madrid will be, along with the United Kingdom, the pioneer in introducing this subject in the institutes of the capital of Spain. The educational program will be implemented gradually in the next three courses and will begin this same 2014/2015 course in 15 technological HEIs in the region. The objective is that in less than five years, 240,000 Madrid students have studied two years of programming and 60,000 will have completed the full program.
In Peques and More We are very fans of children learning to program, as we had commented in the article by Simon Peyton, and despite the distraction caused by his sandals from Brian's Life, the objective of these initiatives should not be to consume technology or make very sophisticated programs. The challenge is get children to participate in how it works, make them understand why things happen and teach them to assimilate abstract concepts doing it also in a fun way.
It is the same case of Chess, which we have been talking about for more than a year, the objective is that they learn key concepts and learn to think, work and face a problem. I do not expect this subject to generate programming geniuses nor do I think it is especially necessary that the professors who teach the subject have a lot of experience in programming code or have worked on large projects. We are talking about 15-year-old children, not professionals with more than 10,000 hours.
I congratulate the people in charge of the Community of Madrid who have made the decision to include the Programming as apprenticeship in the Secondary Institutes and my challenge is to try to meet some of the promoters of the initiative to tell us their expectations with this proposal. Surely you have had to read, contrast, talk, motivate and bet on a decision that I think will see results in the medium to long term.
To finish an idea, I think that the image that illustrates the article is something to start removing, the computer classrooms roll where children go, touch the computer !, open office applications or connect to YouTube, you have to start changing it by providing students with laptops in the classroom and use them to learn anything, now also programming. The goal is that computer science must flow across all subjects and you have to take it out of the special classroom to let it run freely among the students.
