I totally agree, there is a big difference between using a computer and programming or designing one and many people don't fully understand that. Just because my kids can surf and play on a tablet doesn't mean they are ready for a job in high tech. I was one of those kids in the 80's who's computer classes were how to use a word processor or excel. It bored me to tears and I thought that was what computers were about until I stumbled onto programming in University.
I was meaning to post this here but got sidetracked last week. It happens to be the first link in the above article and it fits in well with the above discussion.
http://www.motherjones.com/media/20...&utm_campaign=is-coding-the-new-literacyFrom the article:
It's no surprise, then, that the AP computer science course is among the College Board's least popular offerings; last year, almost four times more students tested in geography (114,000) than computer science (31,000). And most kids don't even get to make that choice; only 17 percent of US high schools that have advanced placement courses do so in CS. It was 20 percent in 2005.
A sound reason not to take AP Computer Science in favor of say AP Calculus is that fewer universities give credit for AP CS, as one finds at the AP Credit Policy Search
https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/creditandplacement/search-credit-policies . Having looked at the introductory CS courses at a few schools (Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, U of Washington) I see that the introductory CS course is not standardized across institutions in the way that calculus is. AP CS uses Java, which is a common choice in introductory college CS classes, including at Princeton, but there are courses using C (Harvard), JavaScript (Stanford), and Python (MIT). The choice of language will affect what is taught, although all courses will talk about loops, conditional statements, and functions. One reason high schools may not teach computer science and programming is that there is less consensus than for math or science about what to teach.
