Should we teach coding in schools now. Or should we teach prompt engineering instead?

Note: The original is on the author’s webpage

School education plays an important role in children’s lives. What is taught in school leaves an imprint throughout their lives. As I have always emphasized in past articles, we should not burden schoolchildren; if you add a chapter on AI, then remove/edit another chapter to accommodate the new material, whether it is in AI or coding. In the previous article on this topic, I discussed credit-based learning in schools.

Students learn fast at a young age, and coding is fun for some students with interests. Coding can be taught in schools, as it has been for a long time now. The question is how long. That is, how long would the coding you teach be relevant?

Coding is old now. AI can generate codes that trained students can understand. Newer languages continue to emerge. Why not teach students to generate code using prompts? However, once you receive the output, you need someone to verify its correctness. In short, the verification of AI-generated code will still require human input for some time, possibly with the help of senior engineers leading the teams managing this code. One day, perhaps, one AI agent could validate another AI agent’s code.

Why not teach students about prompt engineering and prompt engineering-based coding? How to evaluate code is another matter. Students can learn semantics, and then they need to generate code with prompts on GPT and explain whether the generated code is right or wrong. This aligns with the idea that white box testing is a future need. However, only experts in the area will be able to secure these jobs, while the majority of students can learn the basics.

Hence, schools can plan some courses based on computer science, the foundations of coding, black box and white box testing, and prompt-based coding in the languages they have learned. Students should be introduced to coding languages and given the choice to master one of them, such as C++, Java, C, Python, MATLAB, or more.

So, happy learning, school students! Know that this can be your hobby as well, but note that these fields are constantly changing. New job opportunities may arise soon, so take the best of all that you can get — for example, the best coding languages, the best in AI, Quantum Computing, and Robotics.

Learn with zest; it’s important to enjoy what you learn. If work is no longer fun, take a step back to explore the options that were available to you. Choose subjects that you are most passionate about. Topics like prompt engineering require no special qualifications, and there is nothing to dislike about them.

Photo credit: ChatGPT

Stay well,

Warm Regards,