I was at Bloomington's Makevention Maker Convention (hence the name, think Maker Faire but in a more independent way) last weekend and I spent some time talking to Joey who collects old calculators, and modifies them or makes and programs new ones, usually using the MSP430 microcontroller from TI. He's a member of Bloominglabs so I've followed his work for some time, but it was only recently I got a chance to look at it in greater depth after it was featured on Hackaday, and then in some of the presentation materials he put together for his display.
As a person who's worked in the IT world for some years I have some sense of what constitutes a difficult problem and good code to solve such a problem, and I'm very impressed with what he's done. He doesn't study computer science though, he studies Eastern European languages and cultures. I asked him the obvious question: have you considered doing this professionally?
The answer is he has given it consideration, but doing it for work is not appealing at all. He has no interest in working on projects with narrow constraints and very little about them that he finds interesting. In high school he had done some programming projects for school helping out outside of the regular class day, and even just 2 hour stretches of being in an office by himself coding were unpleasant.
It's great to find these things out before saddling yourself with crazy student debt. Before you know it you're there in your cube having a panic attack while looking at a photo of your kid, which makes it even worse. David Foster Wallace memorably described this scenario in his posthumously published novel about IRS employees struggling with boredom, The Pale King.
There is a whole lot of talk about the importance of STEM education for kids (sometimes they add in art, and it's STEAM. But not Alyssa Milano's early 80s TEEN STEAM). Suggestions include teaching kids to code or setting up makerspaces where kids can learn 3D printing and such.
I recently heard of a project where kids are required to wear 'business casual' and work in a simulation of a software development project coordinated by some well-meaning but ham-fisted 'the children are our corporate future' types. Business casual? Really? Everybody knows programmers, especially the really good ones, get to have crazy hair and tattoos, and wear flip-flops to work if they want to. We want to put kids on the treadmill to death before they've even had fun college experiences? We want Dilbert to be relevant to another generation?
Additionally, it's bad enough hearing adults talk about 'full stack web developers' or 'rock stars that are crushing it' or regurgitating some mangled Agile Argot they've patched together from blog posts and talking to other people fumbling their way thru 'Scrum Mastery' during the work day. Coming home to get the same noise from the kids would be pretty soul-deflating, so no thanks.
This is one area where Minecraft has the advantage. It appears to be a shared generational experience on the order of Woodstock, from what I can tell, only with billions of people instead of a couple hundred thousand tripping in a muddy field. Minecraft was made with, from what I can tell, exactly zero interest in promoting STEM education, or any kind of education, for young people. Most parents are probably ambivalent at best about letting kids on there, although at this point parents who don't let their kids play Minecraft may as well be keeping them in a bunker with a year's worth of canned goods as far as isolating them from their peers goes.
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