US President announces CS For All. #cs4all

A literate and numerate society is an excellent goal. I’d say it’s probably our least goal for a happy, safe and stable society. But the rise in the number of programmable machines and objects has meant that being able to program or being able to think about programming can make a great deal of difference in the jobs you can hold and in the way that you can amplify your own human effort. Cars help us to go faster but computers help us to get more thinking work done. Being able to program, or knowing when it would be a good idea and how to approach it, will be essential for getting things done. 

In fact, having some computer science or programming is handy right now because so many pieces of software can be much more useful if you use their programmatic extensions. 

To give you an example, yesterday I was proof reading my first novel. I’m using the Scrivener software package and, among other features, it allows you to use Regular Expressions to search and replace text. A Regular Expression (RegEx) is a type of pattern; once defined, the computer looks for everything that matches that pattern. 

I wanted to see if, while writing, I’d accidentally written the same word twice. (Believe me, it happens over 100,000 words.) Instead of searching for duplicate words by having to type ‘of of’ or ‘and and’ into a search field and looking for hits, I can use my knowledge of CS to enter the RegEx:

\b(\w+) (\1)\b

And this will go looking for any repeated pattern of the form ‘ it it ‘ or ‘ and an d’. (The RegEx should be read as ‘find all the times that I have put two words next to the other, separated by a space, where the words are the same.) Now my hit list is every possible occurrence of this!

By using a RegEx, I found that I had written ‘some some’, a pattern I never would have thought to check for. But that’s the power of programming. When I know how to tell a computer what I actually want, I can use its power to amplify the impact of my thoughts with reduced effort on my part. 

Many of today’s applications become much more usable with a little programming. Microsoft Excel is another example where a little CS goes a long way. 

That’s why I’m excited by the US President’s announcement on CS for all. You’ll know that our own work in Australia is towards empowering creators and building confidence in all educators and students. It’s great to see such a large and funded initiative being declared for the US. Armed with more knowledge, people can use computers to help themselves and so many more.

You don’t have to be an aesthetic  philosopher or educational rebel to know that an empowered and knowledgable generation of school kids is a beautiful thing. As Mark put it, this is huge!

(Credit: whitehouse.gov)