Stop with the "firsts". This is clearly not the "first time programming was taught to first graders" -- especially since we were introduced to programming back in Kindergarten (20+ years ago).

This doesn't need to be a "first" in order to be an honorable pursuit. The link-bait HN title is really annoying and detracts from the message.

The HN title is unclear, but the point is that this would be the first time programming is taught to all first graders in a country. At least that's what the article's title claim implies: "Computer programming will soon reach all Estonian schoolchildren." The article itself doesn't seem to suggest a mandatory curriculum change at the national level, though.

I'm not sure where to dig up historical curriculums to verify my memory, but I'm fairly certain that programming was a mandatory subject when I was in first grade. I remember the whole class going to the computer lab and using BASIC. Education is not handled at the country level here, so it was unlikely to be country-wide, but the local population served by said school system would exceed the population of Estonia.

As a developer I like the idea. As a citizen I wonder why a nation should prioritize programming before any other skill set? Why not rhetoric, drawing or dancing? What are the underlying assumptions and goals of teaching programming at such a young age? Is any of this evidence based?

It is probably economically motivated. Estonia, like many central and eastern European countries, is seeing strong relative growth in their technology sectors. Rhetoric, drawing, dancing & carpentry are not exactly as likely to drive the nation's economy in 2023 when these children graduate from school.

What if they did?

You cannot really predict the future. In the early 90s in my country (Bulgaria) there was an extreme need of accountants and many programmers emigrated (and we had massive amounts of engineers due to socialist planning). Now accountants are not in a short supply and programmers are relatively well paid.

My point is - you really cannot predict the future. Education is supposed to prepare you for life, whatever it may serve you, not to grant you a carrier.

I'm all for having a better education. And maybe a little programming literacy might be really useful. I just seriously hope the Estonian state doesn't expect its future generations to become a nation of programmers.

I think you may be drawing a fairly extreme conclusion from the article (or my comment). It's unlikely the Estonian government intends to breed a nation of programmers. At the same time, it's not exactly reckless to give school age children the necessary foundation to become developers should they so desire.

I wonder if the goal is not to create programmers? Much like teaching geometry isn't to prepare students for a career of proving the congruency of pairs of triangles.

The mental skills one uses to give unambiguous instruction to an computer may be valuable in communicating unambiguously with humans or decomposing seeming intractable problems.

Then again, you could probably go for a similar goal using mathematics.

Like someone else commented, it's most certainly being done for economic reasons. The advantage is that when you can automate a bunch of work and earn a lot of money doing so, you you're left with lots of time and money to spend on other pursuits like rhetoric, drawing and dancing.

Because programming in itself is a language and now a fundamental language that you will need to understand to talk to "things" in the future?

As a programmer, I have to agree. Of the many skills I think every kid should know, programming does not really rank highly. I'd rather they teach something like cooking or first-aid.

Unless teaching programming or some web design work is taking a huge amount of time each week, there's no reason cooking or first-aid can't be taught as well. However, cooking is one thing that is not likely to be taught; the use of knives or even a single shared oven is a disaster waiting to happen, at least according to my brother (he's a primary school teacher).

My main concern would be having the teachers trained to be able to provide such an education themselves. Often primary school teachers tend to be older and female; for whatever reasons, this is not a demographic that would be particularly capable of learning 'enough' programming to teach it effectively, even at a primary school level.

However, as an Estonian citizen I think it's pretty cool idea. There is a big push here to make the country IT-focused, so it's no surprise this filters down to the lower levels of education.

To those of us outside of the USA, at what age are people in First Grade?

Does anyone know of a good comparison between different schooling systems in the world? I don't mean about their quality, but about stuff like ed asked. Is kindergarten or preschools are mandatory, How many years of schooling are required, are different schools are allowed to change the curriculum when they see fit (teach other subjects), and general "facts" like that.

Of course I can find all about it in Wikipedia, but that would take hours (for different countries around the world) and I wanted to save some time if possible. Thanks!

6 or 7, usually depending on whether you were born later or earlier in the year.

At 7 usually.

My gut reaction is that this is a good idea. It will definitely help develop logic and mathematics skills. I am concerned by the focus on "web and mobile", though. It seems like it would be better to focus on raw computer science for a program like this.

I'm sure that children are going to be more interested in what they can create using programming rather than honing their computer science skills. The web and mobile provide great opportunities for children to play with programming and make something fun.

There already are lots of alternatives, which do not include web or mobile, but are very illustrative for common programming related stuff. Off the top of my head there is an old language called LOGO [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)]. I do not see need to tie imagination to web and/or mobile.

I sometimes make basic freeby sites for friends. Fully grown adults get really excited about having their own web page up on the net. I've got to admit I had fun with LOGO back in the day, but if I'd been able to manipulate the internet, now that would have been exciting...

I remember LOGO on the MicroBee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee) at school, and BASIC was also available, I had a TRS-80 at home.

It is a good foundation to 'programming' as opposed to a whole generation of kids in the 90s who learnt 'web design' with a WYSIWYG editor.

I sort of agree with you, and sort of don't. The web and mobile do provide fantastic opportunities for children to play with programming.

However, I don't think the languages we use do. Bear in mind I'm talking about young children here - I believe the best approach is to provide ways to abstract away programming complexities (i.e, typing stuff) in the same way we abstract away other complex subjects.

I'm a huge fan of Scratch, which is developed by the MIT Media Lab and is influenced by Logo (http://scratch.mit.edu/) - it's a visual programming language, but one that's coupled with online sharing to encourage people to engage and respond to programs people have created.

Computer Science is as appropriate for school children as calculus is. It can best be taught in context of making real things where children can see immediate outcomes, but as a "raw" subject it would probably be ignored as dry, boring and irrelevant.

I guess there will not going to be a hard coding for first graders but some basic introduction to it. Can't imagine any first grader to code an app. Will see once more information about the learning process will be available.

I recall reading a paper that found that the success at the end of the introductory CS course could be measured before the start of the course by a simple test. It measured their understanding of sequential execution, assignment, recursion and a couple of other things. About one-third failed at the beginning and at the end; one third sort of got it at both ends; and one third were successful. Almost all students ended in the same triad that they started in.

To the question. Do young children, say in the first 4 or so grades, show this division in abilities or do most eventually get it?

Or - possibly even more interestingly - would introducing these concepts early help students internalize them?

(I misclicked and downvoted this instead of upvoting, apologies).

It's not a country-wide mandate.

AFAIK no country/state has compulsory programming classes for any level in the same way they require maths etc ((please tell me if I'm wrong!). If so, that's rather surprising in 2012.

Was it also surprising that no school ever had compulsory classes in agriculture/electricity/plumbing/electronics/medicine/all the other things that cause such changes in society, or is programming somehow special?

Agriculture was compulsory at my high school for the first four years. We learned to drive tractors in the first year, managed our own vegetable allotments in the second, administered injections to animals in the third, and pregnancy tested cows in the forth. No, this wasn't decades ago, this is still the case at my school today.

Penmanship is something I recall being a compulsory subject in elementary school. Even though I haven't written anything on paper since I left school, it was a skill that was necessary to get through to that point.

Programming is useful for engaging in many scholarly subjects. Like penmanship, it may simply be that the schools see programming as a tool that will be needed in order to teach subjects in later courses, and not due to any connections to industry.

I think computer literacy is essential for all professions now (software is eating the world, etc) and I think the most effective way to teach it is by teaching programming, not the kind of dumbed-down word-processor courses that remain popular.

As a self-taught programmer from Estonia, I would have loved having programming as a subject in the basic school.

Anyhow, the program will not be quite as successful if skilled programmers with long experience weren't included, or children will not be seeing the full scale of possibilites programming the computer could give to them. That, however, will be a tough task since there's a great shortage of developers on the market, and not all of them would fit neatly into the teaching role.

First to teach programming, sure, I remember learning Pascal when I was in the first grade, that was about 15 years ago.

In other news, Estonian children go to school naked?

Skype as far as I know was started by a swede and a Dane. The Estonian connection I think comes from having a large engineering office there.

Actually the whole idea was brainstormed from day one together with 4 Estonian founding engineers. Those 4 together with Janus and Niklas had worked together already for years, first on Tele2 Everyday portals, then Kazaa and Joltid.

It's a common misconception from both sides. Ask who developed Skype from a random Dane or Swede on the street, and they will tell you that it was made by either Danish/Swedish programmers. Approach an Estonian with a question who actually worked for the funding, marketing etc., and they will probably answer it was the Estonians.

Corrective upvote. In the words of Wikipedia, "Skype was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden" [1]. It would seem the developers were Estonian, but that doesn't make you wrong about its founders. In fact, that makes the article wrong when it says "Skype ... was run by Estonians, until recently was sold to Microsoft [sic]."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype#cite_ref-14