"The jobs are not coming back," said Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, to President Obama when asked about why Apple products cannot be made in the U.S. It was a dramatic moment: cold reality had just reverberated at the highest level. Everybody already knew that the U.S. economy had been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs since the early 2000s. It was alarming to hear that high-tech has also been following suit. And once they go, it is hard to bring them back. It is a lose-lose situation. We are not only losing the jobs, but also the accumulation of expertise, which may otherwise have led to other innovations.
The invention of the printing press and injection moulding gave rise to a few great works of literature as well as affordable furniture and appliances for the masses. Today we are in the throes of another inflection point in the ease of materializing and exploiting new ideas. The global proliferation of the Internet and mobile computation devices has brought about cloud services, mobile app stores, and crowdfunding. It is now possible to go from ideation to prototype in a few days and sign up paying customers before building products. All one needs is a new idea, the will to create and enough domain knowledge to get the ball rolling.
For instance, you could have an idea on a Friday afternoon, throw together a quick prototype of the interaction model in AngularJS or JQuery that evening, get a bunch of friends to try it out on Saturday so you can iteratively demonstrate product-market fit, build a scalable and reliable back-end for the data using AppEngine or AWS on Sunday, and on Monday morning you can launch a KickStarter project to build mobile clients for it.
With unemployment riding a plateau, many young people find themselves with ample time to brainstorm new ideas and hack on them. What they don't necessarily have is the requisite skill to forge the initial prototype that gets people fired up about their vision. That's where massive open online courses (MOOCs), YouTube videos and the like can help. But sometimes there's no substitute for the immediacy and simplicity of an actual human expert on site. That's where ScriptEd volunteers are making an impact in classrooms, sharing the fruits of their training and experience with the next generation of movers and shakers.
Instead of putting students through months of mathematical rigor before they feel the power and joy of creating new software, ScriptEd has them writing code on day one. Sure, they will make mistakes. But even the best software engineers make mistakes; learning happens best through experimentation! More importantly, seeing their code result in visual artifacts before their eyes gives students a taste of what is possible with the skills they are picking up and inspires them to play around instead of plodding through a series of assignments.
In the spirit of quick experimentation, hackathons have been growing in popularity at college campuses across the country. As the term might suggest, a hackathon is a marathon hacking session during which a small group of avid programmers combine their talent and efforts to build something from scratch. Hackathons vary significantly in theme and scope but the notion of banding together to quickly solve a problem using technology remains a central tenet. Not all the results are shining examples of engineering but some of them do go on to improve lives in nontrivial ways, much as Kitty Hawk paved the way for the 747.
If programs like SciptEd succeed then humanity will reap the benefits of a population that doesn't care about unemployment levels and corporate ladders because they know how to build stuff that other people want instead of waiting around for HR departments to call them back. We may see groups of people coming together to invent new products and then scattering to form new alliances later. The future looks promising.
December 9-15 is Computer Science Education Week. On December 11, ScriptEd will host an Hour of Code event at Harlem Village Academies High School in New York City. On December 14, ScriptEd's students will put their programming skills to the test in ScriptEd's December Hackathon.
To learn more, go to ScriptEd.org.