RAISING FUTURE ELITES

The world is moving at a fast pace, it has been, and will continue to do so while humans continue to evolve with it. There was a time when the knowledge of computers was too advanced for the average man, now the average man is one with the knowledge of computing. It feels just like yesterday when programming was a very big deal and a very big flex, now children are learning it and in the next 5 - 10 years it will be something everyone should know. In the next 20 years the knowledge of programming will be a work in the park and those who don't have it might even be regarded as illiterate. This is how much the world is evolving and how much humans can evolve with time. Sometimes I even wonder if we are evolving to our own detriment, but then again, we can only watch and see.

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Like I said before, eventually everyone will get to understand the basic knowledge of computer programming, as we can see a lot of schools are already adding it to their curriculum. But what I will frown upon is making computer programming compulsory for all. Right now even the basics of computer programming is hard to grasp. Especially looking at the history of computer programming. This is why I would advise children to learn the basics, but if after learning the basics it is made compulsory to learn other parts, then I will say it’s not fair as there are always those who would not excel in their academics if computer programming was compulsory. Children are already learning computers and computer programming stems from the knowledge of computers, therefore forcing them to learn programming is like forcing students to learn further maths.

Growing up, maths was the nightmare of a lot of children. However,there came the introduction of further maths which was more than a nightmare for even the science students. Even the very intelligent ones still found it difficult. Recently I was talking to my younger brother who is currently attending the school I attended then, and he said that he never met the subject (further maths). This made me wonder exactly when that subject was scrapped because I was really worried for my brother considering how tough it was for me then and knowing how tough that school can be. But when he told me that he has never come across such a subject I knew it meant the school had seen its mistakes in making that subject compulsory and that's how I think it will be for computer programming if it is made compulsory.

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I remember how I wrote my first c++ test as a computer engineering student. It took a lot out of me and every single person in the department. We were reading without understanding and the more we read it the more it didn’t make sense. Our lecturer even gave us an open book test, yet the highest score in the test was a 5/20, I scored 4/20. During the exam, I decided to cram everything I could, I crammed the syntax of all the examples the lecturer gave and thankfully he decided to make the exam over 90 seeing how we all failed the test. Only two people in the entire department of over 500 passed the exam and that was me and my sit mate. Turns out his exam questions were exactly what he gave us as examples which I crammed and past. That is how hard computer programming can be even at the basic level and making it compulsory will be very unfair.

THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 167 EPISODE 3