Disclaimer: I worked on Code.org's Blockly tutorials.
I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work, but this leaves a real bad taste in my mouth.
Frankly, I don't believe that Bret doesn't understand the nature of marketing. He must be aware that http://code.org/quotes is a tool to help influence policy and garner support, rather than a statement on the proposed mechanisms of education.
Code.org has lots of empirical evidence that having celebrities involved inspires kids. Having female role models encourages girls to try. Showing national politicians from both sides of the isle eases local policy progress.
I taught Scratch in a Harlem classroom once a week in the months leading up to the Hour Of Code and struggled. Once the Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies tutorials were ready to beta, I tried it on the class and the results were incredible. Kids that did nothing all semester were suddenly cruising through levels and jumping up and down with excitement. When they went back to Scratch, they suddenly were making dramatically more progress and being creative.
Should also mention, that we've got tons of unplugged activities and lots of other educational materials too. Even more on the way: http://code.org/educate/curriculum
I've lost a lot of respect for Bret Victor just now because he's belittling the work of people who genuinely care and who would love to see his ideas incorporated. There's a much bigger battle to be fought before we can even consider what he's proposing, but he seems willing to work against incremental progress because it's not revolutionary in quite the way he likes.
We've got many types of learning materials at http://code.org/learn from all sorts of providers. My contract with Code.org is over, but if Bret wants to show us how its done, I'm sure the team is willing to share our megaphone.
He's belittling the political stance of code.org as represented by its marketing.
He's not saying "don't teach kids how to program", he's saying "we're teaching kids how to program for the wrong reasons". The implication is, if you're teaching it for the wrong reasons, we're not doing the best we could for the kids.
That's a perfectly valid thing to say, independently of the good intentions and sincere efforts of all the people involved.
If you know anything about politics or marketing, you know that is far too subtle of a stance to communicate to a broad audience. I think that if you dig in to the work Code.org is doing with educators and policy makers, you'll discover they understand the subtleties of both teaching kids to code for the right reasons, as well as leading a movement.
But is it terribly constructive to do it in such a snarky, belittling way? If they're doing good and you think their methods are wrong, I mean, you can say that without being an ass. Though I guess it doesn't matter.
That was my impression also. I was taught programming in school in the 80s and it was part of our mathematics class, to do what Papert intended. Many of us went on to have technical careers in architecture (the design teacher went crazy when CAD was available) and science. I don't recall among my peers at the age that booting up a command line and writing some lines of code was a frightening thing at all, and was 100% designed, as a class, to teach us more ways to express ourselves and consider problem solving. Seeing marketing these days as 'learn to code! make money!' is really sad as it misses the point completely - my peers and I are making good money now because we learnt to think with and put to use the tool that is programming.
Where does Bret actually call out code.org as having done anything wrong? It's possible to interpret his comments as applicable entirely towards the public statements displayed. Indeed, he specifically calls out the thought process that is apparent, not the goals of code.org. Note he didn't even say they should be removed, he just lamented what they indicated about national policy.
I don't begrudge companies their successful marketing, but in some cases I get a little depressed at what it can imply about the public.
Effectively, Bret is taking a single page of quotes that are used in a marketing effort in order to frame the conversation in ways that people understand. Zuck's quote, for instance, conceptually maps directly to the open job market for engineers as a perfectly valid reason to learn programming.
It's pretty trite to say, just because Zuck says something about there not being enough engineers to fill the open positions, that he wants you to be a "cog in the wheel". What a horrifically poorly formed argument.
The effort of moving people is one that requires incomplete, idealistic language. That's the ugly truth of marketing. Incomplete doesn't mean dishonest, but it very well may mean "intellectually hollow". And the truth is, the real intellect is in understanding what gets us to where we want to be: a place where we unlock the educational power of learning to program by convincing people to try it.
<reckless>
It's like convincing someone to lose weight so they'll look better, when really you're wanting to prevent them from a heart disease.
</reckless>
I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work, but this leaves a real bad taste in my mouth.
Frankly, I don't believe that Bret doesn't understand the nature of marketing. He must be aware that http://code.org/quotes is a tool to help influence policy and garner support, rather than a statement on the proposed mechanisms of education.
Code.org has lots of empirical evidence that having celebrities involved inspires kids. Having female role models encourages girls to try. Showing national politicians from both sides of the isle eases local policy progress.
I'm feeling pretty good about my involvement, because I've seen a lot of comments from parents and teachers like this one: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=538314902931484&set=...
and videos like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_t3-3vPp-g&feature=c4-overvi...
I taught Scratch in a Harlem classroom once a week in the months leading up to the Hour Of Code and struggled. Once the Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies tutorials were ready to beta, I tried it on the class and the results were incredible. Kids that did nothing all semester were suddenly cruising through levels and jumping up and down with excitement. When they went back to Scratch, they suddenly were making dramatically more progress and being creative.
Should also mention, that we've got tons of unplugged activities and lots of other educational materials too. Even more on the way: http://code.org/educate/curriculum
I've lost a lot of respect for Bret Victor just now because he's belittling the work of people who genuinely care and who would love to see his ideas incorporated. There's a much bigger battle to be fought before we can even consider what he's proposing, but he seems willing to work against incremental progress because it's not revolutionary in quite the way he likes.
We've got many types of learning materials at http://code.org/learn from all sorts of providers. My contract with Code.org is over, but if Bret wants to show us how its done, I'm sure the team is willing to share our megaphone.