school – top 1% in the country in test scores and enough

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Trust me. I was just as confused a few months ago, when I was 18. I’d taken an AP Computer Science course in high school a few years earlier , but since then my coding experience—and, more importantly, my time—had dwindled to literally zero. With the constant reminder that my business rivals had been coding for years, I knew something had to change.

After six months of fruitful experimentation with Code School, a stack of daunting textbooks, and a ton of Dunkin' Donuts orders later, I can finally call myself a coder.

Yes, out of over 500 students (many of whom took the same computer science course as me), I can count on one hand all of them who code at least occasionally. Why, in a world overflowing with IT jobs, do so many students avoid programming?

Educational trap
Where to begin? I went to a very prestigious public
funding to provide all students with Surface Pro tablets. Yet, the computer class listed was computer science. Period.

Only 5% of schools in the US teach the subject. The public education system iceland whatsapp number list treats
computer science as a second-rate elective, included in the curriculum only to
say and demonstrate that technical subjects are taught, too.

Computer science exams in the US require students to write code with pen and paper
Computer science exams in the US require students to write code with pen and paper
An even bigger problem is that the few computer science classes that are taught in schools are terribly structured. AP Computer Science focuses exclusively on Java, a back-end, strongly typed, object-oriented language. I
don’t want to downplay Java’s usefulness (it demonstrates many core programming concepts), but for non-techies just starting out, Java is simply boring.

By the end of my computer science class, we had learned how to
convert Celsius to Fahrenheit using Java, written a rock-
paper-scissors game (alas, in plain text), and built a
tip-counting program. No graphic design. No UI. No CSS.