The beauty & joy of computing | Dan Garcia | TEDxBerkeley

Dan Garcia has been redesigning computer science education, especially for secondary schools. Today, as coding is essential to all aspects of society, we must increase computing literacy.

Dan Garcia is a Senior Lecturer with Security Of Employment in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the faculty in the fall of 2000. Dan received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 1995, and dual BS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1990. He was chosen as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012.

He is active participant in SIGCSE (the annual computer science education conference, having presented every year since 2001), and is currently working with the ICSI Teaching Privacy research project. He serves on the ACM Education Board, the Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles Development Committee, is the faculty champion for the local Computer Science Teachers Association chapter, and the faculty co-director for BFOIT, a wonderful Berkeley K-12 outreach effort.

[notagain]

I saw the smart phones in the slides at the beginning and was like wait a minute . This was 7 years ago and yeah my phone looked like that wow we came such a long way. I learned a lot from this ted talk

[ubermensch]

1:31 I bet you this guy had been having nightmares with those senators interrogating Mark Zuckerberg

[computingatschoolTV]

Added to our conference keynotes playlist. :)

[MrKingOfNever]

Where is the support for the claim that "we need everyone to be fluent in computing" and "computing is the new literacy?" Why, exactly do we need this again? How exactly does knowing how to write code help a doctor or lawyer do their job? We specialize in different jobs for a reason. During the industrial revolution, did everyone learn how to smelt iron? No, because just because it affected everyone's lives, doesn't mean everyone had to play a direct role in the process.

[artcurious]

I enjoy Ted talks but we really need to get beyond this pathological fixation with disparity. There are differences all over the world that’s what makes life interesting. Expecting computer science enrollment to reflect the population is like expecting the NBA to reflect the population. Most of the population can’t dunk, is less than 6ft tall, and isn’t interested sports.

Same with computer science, you can tell everyone to start coding and offer more classes that’s great. It’s like taking theater classes. But the reality is that only a certain segment of society is going to commit to coding as a profession and even less as a hobby. That’s a good thing. There’s a lot of subjects to explore, there’s more to life than chasing whatever the popular degree is.

[senecamanu]

I came here to be inspired, instead I got politics and equity.

[MikeKay]

I looked at some salary statistics and engineering was scoring pretty low, Software engineering was so so. you think that has anything to do with what people choose what to study? I even know people that have re-educated themselves from software engineering to become plumber or electricians, why? better paid and 8-16 work hours. Don't get me wrong CS is great but as a career. . . companies seems to make a real effort to make it unattractive.