What we should be teaching kids about CS and changing our tools to get there: Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro gave the opening keynote at VL/HCC a couple weeks ago. (See Amy Ko’s great summary of VL/HCC this year.) He shared the slides with me, and he just made a video of himself re-giving the talk.

Ben has been exploring what we need to teach kids to prepare them to create authentic applications for the world that they live in — multiple, heterogenous platforms with rich networking.  He wants kids to think about networks, failures, and communication between programs running on devices with different capabilities. Today, we talk about teaching kids variables and loops. Tomorrow (like, literally tomorrow), we should be teaching them about the realities of the digital world in which they live.

But we’re not going to do this with Scratch, Python, or Java. He’s suggesting new kinds of tools, including having young kids work with machine learning.

I recommend letting Ben change your thinking about the next things to teach in CS.