Coding should be a requirement in every public school…. We have a huge deficit in the skills that we need today versus the skills that are there. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple speaking to President Donald Trump at White House, 2017

Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. New York Times article, August 10, 2025.

What has happened to the need for all U.S. students learning to code that Apple CEO Tim Cook, speaking to President Donald Trump in 2017, said was imperative and then, less than a decade later, a college graduate’s fruitless search for a coding job?

Even with AI readily available to many teachers and students in and out of school (12 states require students to take a computer science course to graduate high school) over half of U.S. high schools offer computer science and coding in 2025), such courses are no longer the golden subjects that Silicon Valley moguls had urged American schools to embrace since the 2010s (see here). This swift rise and fall of coding as a school subject is a story worth telling as another history lesson of how tax-supported public school curricula are remarkably vulnerable to external lobbies of influential power brokers.

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The strong smell of Silicon Valley self-interest accompanied these proposals to improve schooling through teaching children and youth to code. Behind Code.org and other advocacy groups have been the thick wallets of donors and technology companies carrying iconic names. In pushing state and local education officials to require computer science for high school graduation, substitute for a foreign language requirement, and have five year-olds learning to code wafts the odor of companies seeking graduates who can enter the computer and information workforce as programmers and software engineers. Keep in mind, however, that all of these jobs are but a tiny fraction of the entire U.S. workforce (see here).

Backers of coding in public schools have been a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley firms and donors who see the necessity of coding and computer science as being part of the required curriculum in U.S. schools as it has in over 15 European nations and Israel (see here and here). Champions of coding and the subject of computer science in the U.S. have lobbied policymakers to insert coding and computer science into state curriculum standards and graduation requirements (see here and here).

Not unlike earlier pressures from early 20th century businesses to introduce vocational education courses like wood-working, welding, printing, auto mechanics into secondary schools (see here), the current passion for students to learn coding among today’s high-tech companies repeats this earlier pattern again. That schools become places to prepare future workers is surely no surprise since tax-supported public schools have historically had that as one of their primary purposes for existing. So, teaching children and youth how to code falls squarely into that tradition of schools preparing graduates for an ever-changing economy.

eBird, now the world's largest citizen science project with over 2 billion bird observations, is transforming ornithology by turning casual birders (and even TikTok-using kids) into vital contributors to global research and conservation. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been one of the most influential organizations in the world when it comes to encouraging people to engage in natural history projects. While some form of amateur involvement in science projects has been around since 1900, when the Audubon Society organized the first Christmas Bird Count, it was the Cornell Lab that formalized citizen science as a sound and reliable means of collecting data on birds. It didn't take much thought to realize that one of the richest sources of information about birds resided in the notebooks virtually every birder has kept, often from childhood. It's a given that birdwatchers list everything. The problem is that zillions of such notebooks sit forgotten in drawers or in dusty boxes in the attic. If only all of that information could be gathered together, organized in sensible ways and then made available to anyone who wanted to use it. What a resource that would be! After lots of trials and discussion, a small team at the Lab came up with the idea of eBird. It started in a humble way back in 2002, as simply somewhere birders could store their records in a central location. Today, "humble" is no longer an appropriate description. In 2022, its 20th anniversary year, a total of more than 1.3 billion records had been received from more than 820,000 participants. In the month of August this year, reports eBird, 123,000 birders submitted 1.6 million lists of sightings. It has now hit a total of 2 billion bird observations since inception.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Comments

There’s something extremely calming and pleasing about watching a screensaver that merely bounces some kind of image around, with the DVD logo screensaver of a DVD player being a good example. The logical conclusion is thus that it would be great to replicate this screensaver in Lego, because it’d be fun and easy. That’s where [Grant Davis]’s life got flipped upside-down, as this turned out to be anything but an easy task in his chosen medium.

Things got off on a rocky start with figuring out how to make the logo bounce against the side of the ‘screen’, instead of having it merely approach before backing off. The right approach here seemed to be Lego treads as used on e.g. excavators, which give the motion that nice pause before ‘bouncing’ back in the other direction.

With that seemingly solved, most of the effort went into assembling a functional yet sturdy frame, all driven by a single Lego Technic electromotor. Along the way there were many cases of rapid self-disassembly, ultimately leading to a complete redesign using worm gears, thus requiring running the gears both ways with help from a gearbox.

Since the screensaver is supposed to run unattended, many end-stop and toggle mechanisms were tried and discarded before settling on the design that would be used for the full-sized build. Naturally, scaling up always goes smoothly, so everything got redesigned and beefed up once again, with more motors added and multiple gearbox design changes attempted after some unfortunate shredded gears.

Ultimately [Grant] got what he set out to do: the DVD logo bouncing around on a Lego ‘TV’ in a very realistic fashion, set to the noise of Lego Technic gears and motors whirring away in the background.

Thanks to [Carl Foxmarten] for the tip.

About four-in-ten parents say they could be doing better at managing their kid’s screen time. A larger share – 58% – say they’re doing the best they can.

The post How Parents Manage Screen Time for Kids appeared first on Pew Research Center.