I’ve lived in Wyoming in the past (one of the pretty parts), it’s different than most places.
The key to understanding this bill is that Wyoming is subsidized entirely by energy exploration. There is no corporate or individual income tax, low property and sales taxes and no will to raise them any time soon. With coal, natural gas, and oil prices permanantly sagging they’re thrashing around looking for ways to replace those royalties. This is one of the prongs in the state’s new approach, they are also drafting legislation attempting to capitalize on blockchain tech using thier biz-friendly culture and cheap energy.
I hope they figure it out, people I care about have jobs tied to state funding.
WTI futures are at $65 and heading north. Most oil production in the US is now solidly profitable at those levels. Some of that production is extremely profitable there, which is why US oil production has been soaring. The dollar, which heavily dictates the price of oil, is heading south with the vast endless sea of budget deficits inbound over the next ten years.
Higher commodities prices due to a debased dollar, is an easy bet for the next decade. The trade wars will likely make the dollar damage worse.
I think it's credible to be concerned about a government that is funded entirely based on fossil fuels, given the likelihood of electric vehicles and renewables / alternatives playing an increasing role in transportation and energy in the future.
Medium term, this is probably not an issue, IMHO. But the outlook could be grim if "peak oil" actually happens due to lack of demand, and no reform has happened. The Economist pointed out (https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21738583-tradi...) that this already has happened in Venezuela (a very different situation than Wyoming in terms of government contract, of course, but one that shows the dangers of overreliance.)
Ha! Former Wyomingite here. The key person mentioned in this article--State Superintendent Jillian Balow--was my junior high English teacher. I can safely, and, sadly, assure you these folks have no idea what they're doing. In recent years, Wyoming has made a habit of cargo-culting tech trends and this is just the latest. It will invariably be a boondoggle like all the rest.
why don't you go on and do it then with a good argument. No need to go all out, a glimpse of an argument would help, otherwise mentioning a person from what, 10 to 20 years ago is simply ad-hominem. There is no doubt that cs education is more than a fad.
All it really takes is awareness. There's a lot of untapped talent in these states where for most most kids CS isn't even on the map as a career path, where I'm from smart kids get told to be doctors or lawyers. I didn't start coding until I was in college and went from nothing to full stack development with some machine learning skills in 12 months through self-teaching. I wish I'd had something like this when I was younger. Even if the implementation is awful some kids will take to it like a sponge and continue learning on their own.
I totally agree with what you said. I'm really quite sad how late I got into programming (at 14) by basically some random occurrence. Yeah, at the moment I'm ahead of my peers by significant amounts, but I know I could have done\would be doing a lot more, a lot more efficiently if I had had any formal education from the start on related topics, lessons that start with the sentence "Today we're learning how to use Microsoft Word" don't really count.
Just because someone was an English teacher doesn't mean they can't design an effective program to teach a different discipline. If you think it's because she was a bad teacher, maybe she was a bad teacher and a good administrator.
It's just a matter of marshaling the right talent to build the right parts of it.
How do you identify one capable to teach CS, capable to teach ages K-12, and willing to work for very little pay? Is the goal to train existing teachers (would they make more money because of it?), or hire a CS veteran to teach?
I think the best way to do this is to hire on CS veterans who want an early retirement but still need the health benefits and wouldn't mind a bit of spending money. Especially targeting people who are moving from a higher CoL area to a lower CoL area. Have them teach a half load on a 2/3 salary and with full benefits.
This gets complicated because of teacher's unions, but I think it's the best bet at getting high quality folks in CS classrooms.
Others will mention HS math teachers. Having spent enough time in US k12 classrooms to have an opinion on this topic, I think this can work out really well, but I'm not at all convinced it's a panacea. Mostly because many, many HS math teachers have learned how to teach specific math courses, but don't actually have a firm understanding of mathematical thinking in general. Training them to become CS teachers will fare about as well as teaching history teachers to become CS teachers (again, it can be great but lots of variance).
Teach the math teachers how to code, and they become your CS teachers. This is more or less how my HS got enough teachers to teach the CS courses, as they made it mandatory for all students to learn.
Learning how to code is easy; a lot of teachers can do it. Learning how to debug is quite a bit harder. Learning how to debug someone else's code is a lot harder. But this is essential in being able to teach coding effectively (not debugging someone else's code as such, but being able to find the bug and steer the student into a way of finding it themselves).
Your proposition also assumes that you have enough Maths teachers, which Australia is certainly lacking (for the same reasons as OP)
This is also how my high school did it. It didn't work out well, although as far as I know they're still teaching. These weren't bad math teachers: they were probably some of the best in the school; it's just that the couple months or a year of training they must have received was clearly not enough for them to handle those classes at all.
My guess would be training. You can have an online-supplemented course where most of the material is pre-canned and the teachers know just enough to guide the students through a semester or a year of class.
I doubt they intend on teaching much beyond the basics at that level, which shouldn't be hard for any teacher to learn.
Nope, this doesn't work. You get teachers who can basically teach students to memorize a bunch of computer science topics, but not those that can help at all in helping students when their code inevitably doesn't work.
"With a population of just 579,315, Wyoming is positioning itself to become a leader in one of the fastest-growing industries in the world: cybersecurity."
No it's not.
Outside of Jackson and environs it is frankly a miserable place to live. Imagine a wind-swept steppe petro-state inhabited by a mostly rural, extremely conservative population. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and perpetually windy. I could say "windy" 8 more times and it still wouldn't capture the reality. Like many states in this position, mostly rural, most jobs don't require a degree, almost everyone who gets one leaves for better pay, usually to Colorado.
I do believe that this bill is a great idea, but it's not going to magically transform their economy.
So I want to address the people downvoting you. Last summer I went to Big Horn. The town next to it was somehow more third world than where I'm from, the Deep South. Examples:
* Google maps told me to get off at Exit 29B. It turns out it was exit 298, just somehow Google maps had only OCRed the signs, and as of summer 2017 no one had cared to correct them.
* Screw LTE or 3G, somehow the city center only had 2G. Outside of the city, even with visible line of sight, there was simply no service.
* I ordered biscuits and gravy at a restaurant for breakfast. I was informed that it would be a few minutes, as the owner's daughter needed to go down to the grocery store and pick up another can of biscuits.
* At said restaurant, I was asked if I wanted smoking or non. The two rooms had no separation, and both were filled with smoke.
I love Wyoming, it's a beautiful state and I'll be back this year, but they aren't going to be the next forefront on cybersecurity.
I'm from Colorado and have been going to different parts of Wyoming several times a year for nearly a decade.
Outside of Cheyenne and Jackson Hole, what I listed is extremely representative of Wyoming. Cheyenne isn't much better, and the whole point of Jackson Hole is to get away from computers for a while.
Edit: also this was Buffalo, so it was a full on incorporated city of thousands.
Ha! I know that restaurant. Pretty abysmal - but I think it's the only place in town that's quite that bad.
But the town does have two redboxes, so it's got that going for it...
I know a couple of people in that area (a bit up the mountain to the east) that choose to live there. One is a CostCo executive that is the regional manager some vertical (I want to say produce, but that might not be right) for most of the stores of the north half of everything west of the rockies. He's on the road a lot, but seems to want to live there. The other is an IT guy (well, internal developer) for Whole Foods and moved there and works remotely. Now - Montana is a more common place for remote hermit developers to go to, but a shocking number of retired/retiring people move to Buffalo. (Well, shocking to me because I wouldn't, but for a town of 4,500-or-so of that particular average age, having the influx-rate match (or exceed) the death-rate is in itself surprising (to me). It also fluctuates a lot with oil & natural gas prices -- I think the population was down around 3,000 by mid-2015)
> Indeed, Casper then Cheyenne have the most modern economic situation Wyoming has to offer.
Which is still pretty shitty. I live in Casper, and tech jobs are basically non-existent. I know of some places that hire people for PLC stuff. Outside of that there are three places I could work as a developer.
Cheyenne may be different. I've noticed they have tech meetups, a tech bootcamp, etc.
The root post on this is harsh but accurate in my opinion.
And Jackson is really expensive. Not quite Bay Area expensive yet, but Seattle area expensive. There are some parts of the state that are cheaper, beautiful, and less wind blown, like the Big Horn mountain area where I grew up. But they're still cold, conservative places dominated by the extractive industries. I got out as soon as I could.
It is nice to see the state making an effort to attract new industries, but it's really hard going. This Bloomberg article[1] sums it up pretty well: The small population is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. People don't want to live there because there are no jobs, and companies don't want to relocate there because there are no people.
There's also cultural resistance to new industry. People (men especially) want their coal and oil and timber jobs back, not these new high-tech jobs. It's not even that the populace isn't smart enough to do them--mining is actually a pretty technical field at this point. But there's a deep rooted perception that sitting at a desk all day isn't a "real" job.
> There are some parts of the state that are cheaper, beautiful, and less wind blown, like the Big Horn mountain area where I grew up. But they're still cold, conservative places dominated by the extractive industries. I got out as soon as I could.
Personally I prefer the more conservative environs versus the often over-bearing liberal attitude which dominates the Bay Area or other large cities. Perhaps the cold wind blown regions help people keep a level head. ;) So it's a matter of perspective.
Regardless, there are a lot of beautiful parts of the state and the K-12 education in many parts of the state excels [1]. Partly thats due to taxes from the mineral extraction industries.
> There's also cultural resistance to new industry. ... It's not even that the populace isn't smart enough to do them--mining is actually a pretty technical field at this point.
Unfortunately the cultural resistance to new industries does exist and dampens the development of new industries. Wyoming has a lot of talented industrially minded people. Many people grow up mechanically inclined due to the culture (here and surrounding states). This leads to younger Wyoming residents who are much more open to technology industries and looking for ways to stay in the state and willing to start businesses or create new technologies [2, 3]. There's also technology initiatives by the University of Wyoming, which due to the small population, have a impact across the state [4]. There is even some interesting deep learning research happening at the university in conjunction with a well known SV company [5].
All in all, the state has a small population but a relatively out-sized opportunities for those inclined to find them. Initiatives like the one in the article do make an impact here.
Jackson is REALLY expensive, even for a ski town and even compared to the Bay Area. Plus, there aren't any jobs that would allow anyone to live there for the house prices.
If it's so windy, and they have experience in energy fields, a natural thing would be to use that to develop new and better wind based power gen. Of course, it's really hard to embrace the new thing that is killing the old thing you made lots of money from.
In high school I took a MS Office class my senior year - that was pretty much the extent of it. That was the beginning of my CS career, and I'm grateful that it was offered.
Honestly, the 'office skills' class I took was one of the most genuinely useful courses I took in middle school, simply for the keyboarding instruction. Although in 06 my high school, which was very proud of it's Cisco networking programs, didn't offer any CS courses.
I was forced to take that class my first time through college. Somewhat predictably, I was one of only two or three students under 40 in that class. Also somewhat predictably, none of the under-40 students had any trouble or needed any help.
I figured there would be more than two or three, since they forced us to take it, but there were not.
This is great! But I wouldn't call it forward thinking. Forward thinking would be doing this in the early 90s. At this point it's very much reactionary.
The best change in real-world implementation is probably going to be letting high school kids take CS for math or science credit. Opens up a lot of options for students.
The next big issue:
"Each school district within the state shall provide educational programs sufficient to meet uniform student content and performance standards at the level established by the state board of education in the following areas of knowledge and skills."
Now the BoE has to establish good CS standards. I don't really love the CSTA standards (my issues with which are beyond the scope of this post) but they're a decent starting point.
Passing a bill is certainly a small step forward but the focus should be in the implementation (like in every other thing) and the details within it. Factors such as the provision and quality of teacher training, resources for teachers to integrate CS in the classrooms, support for students to work on meaningful projects rather than dry, academic projects, and job prospects will probably be more influential in making this a "forward-thinking" step.
I've seen so many articles about schools teaching coding and acting like it's a new phenomenon. I took an AppleSoft Basic coding class in both middle school in 1988 and high school in 1992. Both in regular public high school. Did schools stop offering programming classes?
Yeah, pretty much. My high school nixed their programming and other CS-related classes while I was a sophomore. This was 2001. Probably a terrible move, but they did it anyway. I assume they've wisely brought them back by now.
This appears backward thinking. A focus in CS would have paid off spectacularly over the past 25 years.
Forward looking might involve focussing rather more on the human capabilities hardest for machines to replicate—relationship building, comedy, sales, and one on one coaching or counseling.
While this is a good thing, I don't see this helping them out as a state. TBH, this could even result in more people to move out. This is actually a huge problem throughout the whole world where where the top talent gets scooped up in the most developed areas.
For this effort not to go to waste on other states(and states are not the nation and nor are they families so it may not be a big concern), Wyoming would have to improve it's infrastructure and turn itself into a migrant hub for the type of people they'd want in. And I don't think the Richard Florida methods are going to work.
My advice for Wyoming is to court rich billionaires who want to be in charge of their own cities. Or intentional communities for higher IQ ethnic/religious groups that want some kind of cultural autonomy.
The trouble is, very few of those rich people actually live here, aside from vacations and for tax purposes. Sadly, most people here (especially the politicians) seem convinced that this current coal bust is part of the normal cycle, and the revenues will come back in a few years. At the point that even China is looking to reduce coal usage for environmental reasons, I highly doubt that the mine revenues will ever return to peak levels.
The only tech that the state seems to have attracted is datacenters, but those don't provide much in the way of tax revenues or jobs.
This seems like a really bad attitude to have against people that are trying to improve in a meaningful way. It's like making fun of an overweight person sweating hard in the gym.
That's not the fault of the legislators. They are not experts in writing a CS curriculum suitable for elementary and high school students.
The key question is whether they can identify competent people to do so. Recognizing an expert in a field where you are not an expert is always a difficult problem.
The key to understanding this bill is that Wyoming is subsidized entirely by energy exploration. There is no corporate or individual income tax, low property and sales taxes and no will to raise them any time soon. With coal, natural gas, and oil prices permanantly sagging they’re thrashing around looking for ways to replace those royalties. This is one of the prongs in the state’s new approach, they are also drafting legislation attempting to capitalize on blockchain tech using thier biz-friendly culture and cheap energy.
I hope they figure it out, people I care about have jobs tied to state funding.