Estonian 1st Graders to Learn Programming

Stumbled across a link to this article on Geek.com on Slashdot yesterday. Estonians have undertaken an initiative to teach computer programming as an integral part of the curriculum to all school-aged children from ages 6-18. To my knowledge, this is the first such program in the world.

This sounds like an extraordinary and ambitious plan. Theoretically, the thousands of hours of programming experience that Estonians would receive under this plan would give them an enormous professional advantage over other countries' students who seek to work in programming. Estonians might turn out to be the Kenyan Marathoners of programming.

The implementation of such a plan would doubtless be complicated. I can't imagine the pedagogy of computer science to pre-pubescent children is very developed (pun intended?). But that could be said of any novel discipline. That's not a good reason not to do it.

The United States isn't producing many more computer scientists now than we were 25 years ago. It makes sense that other countries would nudge their future working population to cover those gaps.