Peter Sloot is featured in an article by The Correspondent about education in primary schools. There is a growing voice towards teaching children how to program as early as possible, driven by the industry. Peter Sloot sees it differently however. Peter: “Programming is a very specific skill [and] it is very difficult to predict which skills are needed in ten years from now.” Instead, he argues, we should teach children how to computational thinking: “We live in an increasingly complex world. […] What is of growing importance is the ability to dissect complex problems so that eventually they can be modeled in a computer.”. The actual skill of being able to program in a particular language is only a small part of computational thinking, which also involves breaking up complex problems into parts and identifying patterns and potential causal pathways.
Read the full article here.