Teaching coding to Thai kids good if teachers are equipped for new role – educational economist

[Andycoops]

Native Thai so called English language teachers can't speak English so why would anyone think they can teach code. 

Beggars belief.

[dcnx]

How about this:

 

Give foreigner programmers (anything tech related) a long term visa option with a catch. You must spend a couple of hours per week teaching Thai students how to do what you do.

 

You'd bring those kids up to speed in no time. 

[SoilSpoil]

48 minutes ago, dcnx said:

How about this:

 

Give foreigner programmers (anything tech related) a long term visa option with a catch. You must spend a couple of hours per week teaching Thai students how to do what you do.

 

You'd bring those kids up to speed in no time. 

And kill the golden goose for Thai computer tutors and centers? Big and growing business.

[dcnx]

17 minutes ago, SoilSpoil said:

And kill the golden goose for Thai computer tutors and centers? Big and growing business.

There are too many kids in need to kill private schools. If they want kids to learn coding, whatever they are currently doing and whatever they dream up isn’t working and won’t work in the future. They need to think outside of the box on this one.

 

Private tutoring schools, more foreigner teachers who know the subject, and nothing standing in their way.

[Angry Dragon]

11 hours ago, mok199 said:

As I watch my 5 yr old struggle with his homework , trying to write the symbols for 1-10 in thai script, R U KIDDING ME !!!! 

You have a five year old doing homework, writing numeric symbols in Thai script?  These are two big strikes against his school.  Time for a move, as there are much better schools than that.

[OneMoreFarang]

11 hours ago, Damrongsak said:

I did closely IT related work for more than 20 years.  Product and project management, specs, testing and all that.  I'm surprised that I never maimed or killed a programmer.  But I also did sales, and you never want to kill someone who might be occasionally useful.

That reminds me of our programmers. I imagine how often they wanted to kill the sales guy (the boss of the company) for selling things which didn't exist.

[soalbundy]

My son is 11 years old, his teacher told me that my son reads English better than Thai, why is that he asked. I told him how reading was made interesting in English schools (at least in my day it was) That everybody would have a story book and the teacher would start to read out loud and then pick each child one after the other to continue reading as the story progressed etc. Rote learning I said was counterproductive the children then lose all interest in reading. Very interesting he said, yes I can see your point. My sons next homework was to write one sentence in Thai 200 times. Needless to say he hates reading Thai but I have introduced him to my old Harry potter books in Thai and as long as he is supervised he will read two pages in one sitting.

[OneMoreFarang]

I think with programming it is relative simple: Some people like that kind of thinking and work and they will be good in a job like that. And others don't like it and they will never be good at it.

It's good when school kids and students learn the basics about programming. Some will like it and will want to learn more. And many won't like it and won't be interested.

Show them what it's all about and let them decide.

 

Personally I did my first programming steps on a programmable calculator with maximum 512 programming steps. I liked it and still like it.

[OneMoreFarang]

3 minutes ago, soalbundy said:

My sons next homework was to write one sentence in Thai 200 times.

What did you do with the teacher after that?

[SoilSpoil]

Coding these days is much more focussed on robots. Children who cannot communicate with the machines, will be strongly disadvantaged in the near future. Machines, robots, are expected to do more than 40% of all job related tasks by 2022, compared to around 30% now. Thats an 33% increase in just a couple of years. Modern coding is not just writing endless lines of code, but more about sequencing actions done by machines. Block coding is picture based programming that kids learn from young age onwards.

 

[ThomasThBKK]

9 hours ago, JimmyTheMook said:

My kid learned coding in High School back in USA and is now an engineering student at a prestigious University.

 

No wonder we're smarter.

 

Absolutely normal today everywhere in the western world, even when i was in school before the year 2000 we had Computer Science classes in germany where at least 1/3 of the students enrolled and learned programming in Pascal there, i know quite some of these who had the courses with me still work in CompSci and so do i. 

Thailand is like 2 decades at least behind real countries on this...

[soalbundy]

4 hours ago, OneMoreFarang said:

What did you do with the teacher after that?

nothing, it's hopeless. I plead with my son to read, "What ! for pleasure''? "Yes, that is the road to knowledge, how else are you going to gain knowledge if not through reading".   "youtube"

Why do I bother.

[OneMoreFarang]

9 hours ago, soalbundy said:

nothing, it's hopeless. I plead with my son to read, "What ! for pleasure''? "Yes, that is the road to knowledge, how else are you going to gain knowledge if not through reading".   "youtube"

Why do I bother.

I feel your frustration.

The "funny" thing is that sometimes the solutions are easier to find on YouTube then in writing. 

When I work with computers sometimes strange error messages appear on the screen and an easy "solution" is often to google such a message. Now more and more the "answer" can be found in YouTube videos. Likely the video shows in 5 minutes how to open 3 windows and click on a button. But that is now in a YouTube video. Until a couple of years ago it would be 2 paragraph written entry in a forum.