As many of my colleagues and students know, student cyber skills are one of my big passions. Having been incredibly fortunate to be thrown into the whirlwind of Intel and Silicon Valley, I watched as the local secondary schools and universities responded to this. By the 1980’s the University of California system was requiring UNIX skills (the Berkeley version, of course) of all undergraduates, which later morphed into HTML Web design skill requirements. I am very gratified to learn that our Computer Science faculty is already focused on providing similar courses with a view to making them part of the curriculum for all undergraduates.
Code.org the new non-profit aimed at encouraging computer science education launched last month by entrepreneur and investor brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, has assembled an all-star group of the world’s most well-known and successful folks with programming skills to talk about how learning to code has changed their lives — and isn’t quite as hard as people might think.
I’ve personally used Codeacademy.org
For me at least it’s almost as difficult as learning Spanish (well it is a language I guess so a good comparison)
I think it is primarily important to understand how its done so you can supervise those who do it. Though we train people today, the first generation of coders were just average Joe’s, and some eccentrics who had the knack.