Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

I wasn't very old when I got started with computers. Ten years old to be exact. I took a BASIC programming class at Ball State University that used TRS-80 Model III computers. By today's standards, the Model III would have a hard time competing with a $30 graphing scientific calculator. It didn't matter. I loved it. And because of that, the small private school I attended got some Apple II computers and started teaching some literally BASIC skills.

By 8th Grade every one of my classmates could walk up to a computer in a store and make it print “Joe loves Sally” or “K-Mart Sucks!” in full color with a cool sine-wave pattern. Aside causing a few department store department mangers to blow a gasket, it did have some redeeming value: all the 8th graders knew enough about how they worked to write rudimentary programs. And we all learned how to do word processing and spreadsheets, too.

Flash forward to now: I go to tour my daughter's third grade classroom and learn that today's computer curriculum is all about how to use office suites to do mundane work manually! Everyone is expected to grow up to use a computer as an overpriced typewriter and calculator. There's no sense that computers are tools for automating anything. In fact, I think the closest they get to automation might be “copy row down” in Excel and making mailing labels with Word.

Contrast that with my classmates and I that had a hard time understanding why spreadsheets were useful if you knew BASIC and could write a quick
program that did a lot of what the spreadsheet did anyway. What has been forgotten by today's schools is the real power computers give us: the ability to make the computer do lots of work for us so we don't have to.

Three Ideas to Change Computers in The Classroom

1. Stop teaching productivity tools as a standalone class. Office suites, design tools and even editors are simply tools you use to do something more important. What matters more, the words in the most important letter you ever write or the fact it is written in 10pt Verdana type using styles for easy reformatting? What matters more, the composition and design of a logo or the fact that you got the shiny look by overlaying a transparent gradient over an opaque gradient? As in all things, the real art is using the tool in context of the work.

2. Teach all students how to make web pages with HTML. HTML isn't a real programming language, but it does teach kids a little of how computers work – you have to understand files, folders and some rudimentary code. Once they know HTML, introduce some tools that work with HTML like WordPress for making Blogs, Joomla for making websites and even how to do fun stuff like podcasts!
3. Teach a little programming with Python, Ruby, TK, VisualBasic, PHP, shell scripts – whatever – just make sure that every kid learns to program at least a little bit. Even if it's trivial, teaching kids how computers work is different than teaching someone to do task work with a computer.
   See, in learning to
   program, you learn how the tool on your desk really works. And
   everything you learn will benefit you later in life.

I can't thank Dr. Rob enough for that first computer class I took. Even today when I'm writing a script to walk through a database, doing real time animation, or building a spam filtering script, I'm using the building blocks I learned at age 10. And I still can make
computers at the store do annoying things to the clerk when they aren't looking.