Clueless

Our kid's school has a "Smart Lab", which is a place where kids, generally in 6th-8th grade, can play with technology.

Here is a transcript-by-memory of a conversation I had with the instructor:

Me: Do any of the kids do any actual programming?

Instructor: Oh, yeah. Have you heard of Scratch?

Me: Yes. That's basically like MindStorms; you tell it to move the figure three steps this way, two steps that way. I mean actual coding.

Ins: Sure! Some kids even make webpages.

Me (trying very hard not to laugh in his face): No, I mean actual programming, like goto subroutine, if this then that.

Ins: Oh, no, not really.

Me: (Beating my head against the wall)...

What's amazing is that the technology teacher didn't even know what I meant when I said either "programming" or "coding".

Meanwhile, I asked the other kid's 8th grade computer programming teacher whether they taught any other languages than Java, and if students were taught to document their code. Answers: Other languages are offered later, in high school (the AP test is only Java, so that's the emphasis), and documenting is not stressed in the level 1 class, but in the second class they do.