so I was in class at the beginning of my
junior year and we were getting ready to
start learning a new language and as my
teacher explained some of the ins and
outs in the basic structure of the
language I had this flashback moment to
two years earlier when I was in French
one except at this time I wasn’t
learning French I was sitting in game
programming in web applications at the
Miami Valley career-tech Center and we
were getting ready to start learning C++
I realized that everything that we were
learning it was the same as when I had
taken French so I decided to look more
into it and it turns out the programming
languages function nearly the same as
the languages that we would normally
think of I can draw parallels between
almost every part of speech and a part
of programming in English you would have
nouns persons things in programming you
have literals 10 means 10 pronouns words
there replace nouns in program you have
variables and verbs as any action
operators that you can use above the
parts of speech you also have
punctuation which is just as important
in programming as it is in English in
English if you drop a comma you can go
from a nice family dinner to cannibalism
which isn’t fun in programming if you
drop a bracket or a comma or a semicolon
your program could completely fail or
worse it could do something that you
don’t expect it to do so I saw this and
realized that the structure is nearly
perfect and I looked more into it and I
found a study done by some researchers
in Texas that took a selection of
students studying Java and ran an fMRI
scan while they interpreted a small
snippet of Java code and found that
there were five main activities main
areas of activity Broadman areas 621 40
44 and 47 of these five three of them
areas 21 44 and 47 are all known
language processing centers so not only
is the structure the same
but the brain interprets programming in
a very similar way but with all of this
in most schools in America and across
the world you can’t take programming and
get a language credit for it before I
moved to the Miami Valley CTC at Wayne I
had six periods a day of those six
periods four of them were core classes
math science English and social studies
we also had to take a full year of gym a
half year of Health and a half year of a
fine art and three years of a foreign
language or two years of two different
foreign languages this leaves two or
three open periods two of them in your
senior year that’s not enough time to
get enough experience in programming to
really delve into it and discover all of
its capabilities but if you were able to
take a programming Lit class as a
foreign language suddenly now you have
six spots to take a programming class
this opens up the opportunity for people
who might not have sought out
programming classes to take the class
when they look at their scheduling paper
I don’t really want to take French or
Spanish but programming with Java looks
cool so they take it discover that they
have an aptitude for it that they like
doing it pursue that through high school
and college and then they come out of
college and that person makes some
important contribution to the world of
technology they never would have made
that contribution had they not been
given the opportunity to take the class
in the first place
the purpose of education is to prepare
students to be successful contributing
members of society and as technology
becomes more omnipresent students need
to be able to utilize that technology to
the best of its ability and if education
isn’t doing that it’s not doing its job
now I said almost every school because
in Florida New Mexico and Kentucky there
have been attempts to pass legislation
to support programming as a foreign
language
those three states failed but Texas and
Oklahoma didn’t in Oklahoma students are
required to take two years of a foreign
language or two units of a computer
programming or other computer related
field and in Texas at the end of the
summer of 2017 they passed legislation
to account for programming and other
cyber security related fields in the
foreign language credit these states are
going to see a major increase in the
number of students coming out of their
educational systems into the world of
tech because they have the pathways for
it now
this idea goes even farther back than
just the last few years it goes back as
much as 40 years ago when my grandfather
at the man who really got me into
programming was in his junior year of
high school he was given the opportunity
really late in his junior year to take
his classes at Penn State University for
his senior year of high school so they
rushed through his application and they
discovered that he hadn’t taken a
foreign language which was a requirement
for acceptance to Penn State he was able
to work with a professor at Penn State
and proved to the admissions department
that because of the wealth of
programming languages that he knew that
was enough proof to waive the
requirement under the special conditions
so if 40 years ago Penn State saw the
opportunity for programming to count or
at least be enough proof that he didn’t
need the classes in 2018 I think it’s
time that we look at the educational
system and start opening up the doors
for people to be successful in the world of tomorrow thank you
junior year and we were getting ready to
start learning a new language and as my
teacher explained some of the ins and
outs in the basic structure of the
language I had this flashback moment to
two years earlier when I was in French
one except at this time I wasn’t
learning French I was sitting in game
programming in web applications at the
Miami Valley career-tech Center and we
were getting ready to start learning C++
I realized that everything that we were
learning it was the same as when I had
taken French so I decided to look more
into it and it turns out the programming
languages function nearly the same as
the languages that we would normally
think of I can draw parallels between
almost every part of speech and a part
of programming in English you would have
nouns persons things in programming you
have literals 10 means 10 pronouns words
there replace nouns in program you have
variables and verbs as any action
operators that you can use above the
parts of speech you also have
punctuation which is just as important
in programming as it is in English in
English if you drop a comma you can go
from a nice family dinner to cannibalism
which isn’t fun in programming if you
drop a bracket or a comma or a semicolon
your program could completely fail or
worse it could do something that you
don’t expect it to do so I saw this and
realized that the structure is nearly
perfect and I looked more into it and I
found a study done by some researchers
in Texas that took a selection of
students studying Java and ran an fMRI
scan while they interpreted a small
snippet of Java code and found that
there were five main activities main
areas of activity Broadman areas 621 40
44 and 47 of these five three of them
areas 21 44 and 47 are all known
language processing centers so not only
is the structure the same
but the brain interprets programming in
a very similar way but with all of this
in most schools in America and across
the world you can’t take programming and
get a language credit for it before I
moved to the Miami Valley CTC at Wayne I
had six periods a day of those six
periods four of them were core classes
math science English and social studies
we also had to take a full year of gym a
half year of Health and a half year of a
fine art and three years of a foreign
language or two years of two different
foreign languages this leaves two or
three open periods two of them in your
senior year that’s not enough time to
get enough experience in programming to
really delve into it and discover all of
its capabilities but if you were able to
take a programming Lit class as a
foreign language suddenly now you have
six spots to take a programming class
this opens up the opportunity for people
who might not have sought out
programming classes to take the class
when they look at their scheduling paper
I don’t really want to take French or
Spanish but programming with Java looks
cool so they take it discover that they
have an aptitude for it that they like
doing it pursue that through high school
and college and then they come out of
college and that person makes some
important contribution to the world of
technology they never would have made
that contribution had they not been
given the opportunity to take the class
in the first place
the purpose of education is to prepare
students to be successful contributing
members of society and as technology
becomes more omnipresent students need
to be able to utilize that technology to
the best of its ability and if education
isn’t doing that it’s not doing its job
now I said almost every school because
in Florida New Mexico and Kentucky there
have been attempts to pass legislation
to support programming as a foreign
language
those three states failed but Texas and
Oklahoma didn’t in Oklahoma students are
required to take two years of a foreign
language or two units of a computer
programming or other computer related
field and in Texas at the end of the
summer of 2017 they passed legislation
to account for programming and other
cyber security related fields in the
foreign language credit these states are
going to see a major increase in the
number of students coming out of their
educational systems into the world of
tech because they have the pathways for
it now
this idea goes even farther back than
just the last few years it goes back as
much as 40 years ago when my grandfather
at the man who really got me into
programming was in his junior year of
high school he was given the opportunity
really late in his junior year to take
his classes at Penn State University for
his senior year of high school so they
rushed through his application and they
discovered that he hadn’t taken a
foreign language which was a requirement
for acceptance to Penn State he was able
to work with a professor at Penn State
and proved to the admissions department
that because of the wealth of
programming languages that he knew that
was enough proof to waive the
requirement under the special conditions
so if 40 years ago Penn State saw the
opportunity for programming to count or
at least be enough proof that he didn’t
need the classes in 2018 I think it’s
time that we look at the educational
system and start opening up the doors
for people to be successful in the world of tomorrow thank you
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