Coding
Kids
The
latest language-learning trend has nothing to do with words.
- By Jeff Wise
- Published Nov 29, 2013
The doorbell rings, and Katie
Wenger, 13, leaps up from the family dinner table and throws open the front
door. On the stoop of her family’s building in Chelsea stands a 26-year-old
Yale graduate named Allison Kaptur. Formerly a financial analyst, Kaptur quit
to teach herself how to program and now works as a facilitator at Hacker
School, a “writers’ retreat for programmers,” with a sideline as a coding
tutor. The two descend the stairs to a basement study, and Katie shuts the
door. “I’ve got exciting news,” she says. “I’m going to launch a start-up! It’s
called Let Us.”
“What will it do?”
“It’ll be like Chatroulette, but
connected to Facebook.” Katie describes her concept for an online environment
in which strangers can randomly meet and either just chat or interact
educationally as student and teacher. Kaptur nods. “Okay,” she says. “A little
later, we can talk about the pieces we would need to make that work.”
For most people, software
programming’s social cachet falls below that of tax preparation. But it’s
catching fire among forward-thinking New York parents like Katie’s, who see it
as endowing their children both with a strategically valuable skill and a habit
for IQ-multiplying intellectual rigor. According to WyzAnt, an online tutoring
marketplace, demand for computer-science tutors in New York City has doubled
each of the past two years. And if one Silicon Alley–backed initiative pans
out, within a decade every public-school kid in the city will have access to
coding, up from a couple of thousand.
Down in the Wengers’ study, Kaptur
flips open a MacBook Air. “For now, let’s work on a hangman game.” Lines of
Python code fill the screen. On a piece of paper the two begin sketching out a
stick figure and a flow diagram to figure out how the program will render it.
Katie breathes a sigh. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be,”
she says. “This is going to take more than an hour.” Sure enough, by the time
Kaptur packs up to go, they haven’t yet gotten around to rendering the
stickman’s arms, let alone plotted out the next billion-dollar app.
Back upstairs, the parents are
lingering over a long dinner. Katie’s mother, Susan Danziger, runs a web-video
start-up; her father, Albert Wenger, is a managing partner in the VC firm Union
Square Ventures, an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and
Kickstarter. The couple started Katie and her two brothers on programming when
they were 7 or 8. “The goal isn’t necessarily for everyone to become a
computer-science engineer, just as when you teach people how to write English,
the goal isn’t for everybody to become an author,” says Wenger. “The point is
that it’s a very important way of analyzing the world, thinking about the
world, interacting with the world, and manipulating the world. It is a
fundamental enabling skill that is applicable across the widest imaginable set
of domains.”
Similar sentiments can be heard
throughout the techopolis. Paul Johnson, a 43-year-old software developer who
himself started to learn coding at the age of 6, has told his kindergartner
that he can play any computer game he wants so long as he writes it himself;
father and son are working on a program together now. “It’s almost a
Renaissance education,” Johnson says. “It involves storytelling, it involves
art and creativity, it involves rigorous mathematics, and all of this has to
work together, so you see directly how they relate to each other.”
“Coding is absolutely a question of
literacy,” says Mark Guzdial, a professor of interactive computing at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. “Those who don’t have access to this kind of
education are going to be missing a core skill.”
Last year, tech investor Hadi
Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Dropbox, decided it would be fun to
make a video of tech bigwigs discussing the virtues of learning how to code. He
enlisted his friend Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, to appear in it; within
a week Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had signed up. The video went viral, and
Partovi leveraged the outpouring of enthusiasm into an organization called Code.org. The second week of December, the group will organize its
first worldwide event, “The Hour of Code.” Teachers in 160 countries will
devote an hour of class time to the fundamentals of programming. “Our goal is
get 10 million students introduced,” says Partovi.
Around the same time Partovi was
starting to make his video, a former New York City deputy public advocate named
Reshma Saujani was wondering what she could do to encourage girls to become
programmers. “When it was simply an idea in my head, Twitter came onboard,” she
says. The group, Girls Who Code,
is now backed by a Who’s Who list of tech giants and aims to reach a million
girls by 2020. “When I started Girls Who Code, it was about gender inequality.
Now it’s also about economic inequality,” she says. “I think this is the most
important issue domestically. It’s frightening. Parents who have money are
pushing their kids to learn coding. Kids whose parents don’t have money are
being left behind.”
The economic-utility argument isn’t
one that upper-middle-class parents tend to linger on, but it’s a major
industry concern. Despite the moribund national jobs market, software positions
go begging. By 2020, the industry expects to have a million more positions than
it can fill. Nine out of ten U.S. high schools don’t offer computer
programming, and fewer than one college student in 40 graduates with a degree
in the field. “We have a clear disparity between the needs of industry and the
number of computer-science graduates we produce,” said Maria M. Klawe,
president of Harvey Mudd College, in testimony before a Senate committee
earlier this month. “We simply do not have enough students graduating high
school with an interest in pursuing computer science.”
The bugles are blowing, and New York
City is at the vanguard. One of Wenger’s partners at Union Square Ventures,
Fred Wilson, has raised funds for New York City’s first programming-oriented
public high school, the Academy for Software Engineering, which opened its
doors a year ago. This fall, more than 1,400 students applied for the 108
ninth-grade spots, and a sister school opened up in the Bronx. As a follow-up,
Wilson is launching a new $5 million fund that aims to bring computer-science
education to all the city’s public-school kids within ten years.
Like much tech-world philanthropy,
the tech schools are arriving as a fiat from on high, rather than welling up
from grassroots demand, and it’s easy to read the education evangelism as
motivated, at least in part, by a desire to mainstream techies’ own
idiosyncratic way of looking at the world. Wenger thinks that the shift has
already begun, courtesy of The Social Network and the growing roster of
twentysomething software billionaires. “The biggest transformation I’ve seen,”
he says, “is that coding has gone from something that weird kids do to
something the cool kids do.” There’s nothing dorky about huge piles of cash.