Where are the kid coders? Not in U.S. schools

[Renew Deal]

If you plan to help your kids with their homework in the future, better start boning up on your programming skills now. (And you thought new math was hard!)

The U.K. Department of Education this week made a radical departure from its current curriculum, announcing plans to begin teaching "rigorous computer science" to all children ages 5 to 14. After studying the current state of instruction, the department concluded that computing in British schools had been "dumbed down" and attempts to teach programming dropped. Children were instead merely being exposed to word processors and spreadsheets, "mostly Word, Excel, and, of course, all running on Windows." They axed the curriculum, saying it was "so harmful, boring, and/or irrelevant it should simply be scrapped."

As the British education minister commented:


Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch. By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in university courses and be writing their own apps for smartphones.
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http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/where-are-the-kid-coders-not-in-us-schools-222521