Free Sample Essays > Computer Science
Computers: A New Tool
do not have jobs. So without any income they can not afford to buy anything and are forced to go through mom and dad for finances. So why does it seem that most teenagers dress nicer than I do? Just say no does not only apply to kids. On the subject of freebees: Do you remember the math software I told you about that my nieces use? It was a freebee from school to help them learn. It was donated by the Disney Corporation and it is loaded with nothing but Disney type math games. So not only can Mickey make you laugh but he can help you count too. Parents beware and pay attention. This is why you are the parents because you make the rules.
It seems like almost every day that you hear about how the public school systems are failing and there is not enough money to support theses schools. Even private schools are starting to catch some of the heat as well. People blame the government for investing more money into national defense and crime instead of education. Well instead of blaming everything on the government, which I’m not saying is not totally at fault, why not seek solutions? Let’s take a step back and see where the world is heading and what type of information are children going to need to survive in it in the future. The days of learning about woodshop, metal shop, home economics, and other similar classes are just about over. Not that they are useless. They did serve a purpose but they world is changing and those type of classes are just not needed anymore. What you need now are mandatory computer classes in all schools at differing levels of sophistication. Why? Well you have to ask yourself if a child is more likely to come across a computer on a day to day basis than he is a tack welder.
The current way of teaching is quickly becoming outdated as well. The way we and our parents learned no longer applies. Elliot Soloway an associate professor at the University of Michigan both in the School of Education and the Department of Electrical Engineering in Computer Science state, “All the standards indicate that we can no longer teach kids isolated, decontextualized skills and assume they’ll put them together. That’s how we learned. Now, if we want to ask kids to build models of complex stream ecosystems, for example, we have to give them a new set of tools.”
There was an interesting report written by Victoria Irwin in the Christian Science Monitor titled Hop, Skip…and Software? ; Educators Debate Whether Computer Use for Young Students Makes Them Better Learners or Not. It stated that, “In the late 1990s, the Educational Testing Service found that middle schools students with well trained teachers who used computers for ‘simulations and applications’ in math classes outperformed students on standardized tests who had not used them for that purpose.”
The sooner we start to realize the ease and benefits [next page]