Computer science and software education will soon be adopted as a required course for students, the government announced this July. The decision was made to better prepare youngsters for today’s software-oriented society, according to government officials. Taking into consideration Korea’s software education infrastructure, the government will have to start from scratch. Software education will commence from next year at the earliest, but having started from ground zero, the government’s plans on mandating software education seem rushed.
 
By definition, software is the program or any other operating information used by computers to perform operations. The physical components of computers, their hardware, would be useless without software. This is where the importance of software arises, because while Korea’s hardware is unparalleled, its software is at best modest. Statistics tell us that Korean software’s current share of the global market is less than two percent, and even in the domestic market, more than 80 percent of software is from abroad.
 
Concerns have been voiced about the stumbling Korean software industry, and hence came the government’s decision to nurture future generations of software-literate kids. The Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning announced in July that it will make software education compulsory for middle school students starting next March, and for elementary and high school students from 2017 and 2018, respectively.
 
Surely benefits can be expected to ensue from the compulsory education of software and coding. The government’s decision is actually in line with the curricula of the rest of the developed world, as various countries including the United Kingdom, United States, and Japan have already adopted computer science as a required course for students. It is, then, not incorrect to assume that the government is simply following the trend – being swept along by the fads in worldwide education.
 
The government’s tentative software education curriculum is currently being tested in approximately 130 schools with software-based education involving algorithms and computer programming. Yet, to make software education compulsory for schools nationwide, the government simply lacks the infrastructure needed to carry it out. There are not enough teachers who can teach software programming and languages, and what is more, it is costly to install the various software programs needed for education. The big question is not whether the government can afford it, but whether the costs will outweighed the benefits software education brings.
No one knows exactly what accounts for Korea’s mediocre performance in global software market – whether it is the present nonexistence of Korea’s software education or the poor working conditions in the software industry. However, while there is no doubt that software education would enhance computational thinking and reasoning abilities for students, a quick-fix solution to increase Korea’s software output at this moment would be first to improve the working conditions software engineers face.
 
   
▲ Is the government's decision to make software education compulsory the right one? Provided by go.seoul.co.kr
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