America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

Re:America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries... by Swizec on Thursday March 10, 2016 @10:18PM (#11264443)

As a publicly educated kid from Eastern Europe. We had programming classes as on-school extracurriculars in Pascal when I was 12. In the late 90's.

We started with Logo at 9. In 1996.

Do public schools in other countries not do this kind of stuff?

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Re:America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries... by alxndr on Thursday March 10, 2016 @11:42PM (#11264683)

Programming classes are uncommon in American high schools:

> "There currently are just over 42,000 high schools in the United States. But only 2,100 of them were certified to teach the AP computer science course in 2011"

http://www.exploringcs.org/resources/cs-statistics

edit: Wish I could find the numbers for public high schools, but I'd wager that they're much lower than 5%, with public middle schools smaller still.

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Re:America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries... by learc83 on Friday March 11, 2016 @02:31AM (#11265218)

Just because a school doesn't offer a college level computer science course doesn't mean they don't offer programming classes.

Most of the schools in my area have offered some kind of technology class in middle school or high school that has basic programming modules, but only a few offer AP CS.

I remember programming a robotic arm in middle school almost 20 years ago.

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