Communications of the ACM
Estonia Reprograms First Graders as Web Coders
Credit: Jon Limm
Estonian public schools recently launched a program to develop a curriculum for teaching Web and mobile application development to students as early as first grade.
The program begins with training for primary school teachers, to be followed by pilot programs, and eventually the curriculum will be available to all public school students from grades one through 12. The program was created because of the difficulty Estonian companies face in hiring programmers.
Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation has been sponsoring events dedicated to teaching Web development to youth called Summer Code Party and Hack Jams. Mozilla also has developed Hackasaurus, a collection of tools that help kids learn how Web sites are composed and designed. Mozilla executive director Mark Surman says children start choosing whether to be content makers or just consumers around eight to 10 years of age. "If we want kids to be makers rather than consumers [our goal], this is a critical age," Surman notes. Such efforts are part of a larger movement to improve code literacy among youngsters.
From Wired News
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