Speaking of COBOL and Admiral Grace Hopper, I have one of her actual nanoseconds, a piece of insulated solid wire about 11.2 inches long, when she was a Superintendent's guest lecturer. Since I was a Navy MSCS student, she "signed" it with stripes and gaps in magic marker, as the ones and zeroes in ASCII representing her name.
An enterprising headhunter scoured retirement communities in Florida, Texas, Arizona, etc., in 1999, looking for COBOL programmers who knew where the two-digit dates were in the code. In many cases, the source had been lost by the 1990s, so they really had to know the code. AIUI, the Federal Reserve and many banking systems still run COBOL executables that have been wrapped to enable them to be run on modern OSes on current hardware, much as FORTRAN executables run on NASA missions, such as the Mars orbiters, landers, and rovers. Rewriting such code would introduce bugs galore, especially anything contracted out by the government to the lowest bidder. As for learning computing, I have a slightly different range of students that are my charges than present company. It starts with kindergartners and ends with adults of all ages in colleges and universities. OK, so what the heck can a kindergartner possibly learn about computing? Notice that I didn't say computer science, that's a subset of computing. Computing encompasses mathematics, physics, science, engineering, hardware, software, and all of the more specialized areas under each of those major categories. Programming isn't even up toward the top, any more than soldering is, although my students all learn some things that will be useful throughout their lives, no matter where they wind up career-wise. Here's what kindergartners can learn about computing: the concepts of something and nothing, and that there is literally money in computers. Huh? The little ones don't even see a one or a zero when I start them out - we start with one of the most fundamental concepts in computing that even some freshman CS students often don't comprehend, the difference between something and nothing. I ask them to identify opposites that they can sense, such as light and dark, a marble and an absence of a marble, left and right hands, magnets that attract and magnets that repel, etc. Eventually, we graduate to pennies: nice, shiny, brand-new-from-the-bank pennies that, to a kindergartner, are actual gold. They play with the pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not food or nasal suppositories, under careful supervision by multiple adults. They also find out that there is another opposites concept: heads and tails, which we acknowledge as what we educators call a scaffolding element, upon which other concepts will be built later. They're then provided egg cartons, which enables them to start learning the concept of organization, which even many adults never get close to mastering. After a while, the tykes are encouraged to toss the pennies short distances and they learn that the pennies just happen to fit nicely at the bottom of the egg-holding parts of the cartons. That's when I begin repeating the mantra to them every day: "There's literally money in computers. There's literally money in computers ... " When they start repeating it at home, their parents/guardians thank me profusely when they see me. Now the magic begins - the kids are shown that patterns can be created with shiny pennies and not-so-shiny empty holes. I collect egg cartons from institutional kitchens that use real in-the-shell eggs, e.g. breakfast places like IHOP, Denny's, etc., that serve eggs sunny-side-up/down. Very few kitchens use real eggs any more unless they're serving dishes with actual yolks and whites - omelettes, scrambled eggs, baked goods, etc., are all made with powdered eggs or liquid egg mixtures, even at what you might consider upscale restaurants. The cartons they use are upwards of eight-by-eight eggs in size, which stack nicely for storage, as well as rapid access to make lots of whole, fresh egg dishes. You might be seeing where I'm going with the eight-by-eight cartons, because they're ideal for representing arrays of bits as bytes, with rows potentially representing successive memory locations, registers, graphics buffers, etc. Of course, the kindergartners aren't going to understand anything about those sorts of concepts, but by the time I do get to them, they don't think twice about manipulating pennies in egg cartons. In the higher grades, I teach them binary math after we map pennies to ones and the egg holes to zeroes. They haven't learned decimal numbers and math at that point, yet, so this is a terrific opportunity to get them comfortable with bits without the confusion of seeing 10 and reflexively reading it as ten - it's always pronounced "one zero". At that point, they can learn the four rules for binary addition: 0 + 0 = 0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, and 1 + 1 = 0 and carry 1 to the next digit to the left. This is much simpler than learning decimal addition and prepares students by scaffolding decimal math on top of binary math that they learned as early as possible. Early on, I also ensure that the something-nothing opposites concept of something and null are deeply instilled I use these techniques for students all the way up through elderly adults to help them understand what's really going on in binary digital computing. You would be surprised at how many supposedly computing-savvy people have no idea that computing hardware almost universally executes everything at the bit level, and that the air around them is filled with exabits/second of serialized data via all sorts of frequencies and modulations. Extrapolate that sort of progression through all of the computing concepts discussed in previous posts, and much more, using scaffolding all the way up through the postgraduate computing level and you now have an idea of where computing education is going. This is not your grandfather's, father's, or even your own kind of educational experience, this is something more befitting of the 21st Century, and it's not limited to just computing. Waiting until the post-secondary or even secondary educational levels to teach computing is no longer an option, as we don't have the luxury of only educating an elite few. We have to start as early as possible with everyone and build layer upon layer alongside all of the other fundamentals to establish a citizenry to whom computing fundamentals are as familiar as the A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s, along with other important ideas and skills that haven't been taught appropriately for going on 100-plus years.
