Game programming as a learning source in public education has gained some traction. It’s just not for colleges anymore.

After reading up on some of schools in the midwest (Chicago? can’t remember exactly) starting to teach it as part of the curriculum, I did a little bit of lobbying with the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in Virginia to start up an after school program for kids to learn programming and hardware through games with the XGameStation. Granted it was ARM assembly, but it was so simple that, pardon the expression, even a child could do it.

Don’t really know what happened with it, but I guess the generous donation of free hardware from me went somewhere.

You know, one thing I failed to mention was the obstacle to a high tech education, particularly in the notoriously underfunded “title 1″ schools, is the inability to hire and retain knowledgeable individuals. It’s no wonder when you realize that anyone who could do the job could earn twice as much elsewhere.

It’s a multifaceted problem that I could go on about, but I think I’ll just say if I ever did tutorials they would be designed with this fact in mind.

Teachers must be well payed where you are - I would have said 4 times as much rather than twice. Decent programmers can easily fetch 80k usd/year in Tel Aviv even with only a couple of years of experience, where as a teacher with the same (small) amount of experience would probably get about 20k usd/year.

It would be nice to edit our comments BTW.

Editing comments plug-in installed. Man, that was easy. Why didn’t I do it before? Thanks for mentioning it.

As for teacher pay, when I was a teacher without experience I earned about than $20K, but when I became a software tester, without any experience, I more than doubled my paycheck. So that was my basis for comparison. True, tho, with a little work and a little experience you can go 4 times or more.

It’s a shame teachers aren’t paid more. To the naysayers who say “Teachers basicly only work 1/3 of the year” you don’t realize how hard teachers work during that 1/3 of the year. Lemme give you a job where you’re actively managing 20-30 (or more) people at a time and ask you to do it year round. And that’s not even mentioning the work when you don’t have students, the grading, the planning, the meetings, the trainings. If you’re in a big company talk to your company’s corporate trainer or sales folks and ask them if they’d like to do what they do everyday in front of the same audience, meaning you can’t just give the same presentation over and over but you’ll need to make a new one every day. Then tell them you’ll only ask them to do it 1/3 of the year. I doubt that’ll be much consolation.

Teaching sucks. It’s hard and it doesn’t pay near what it should. If you had a good teacher, even if you had a bunch of lousy ones, you owe them a debt of gratitude for what they put up with to make you what you are.