Speaking of BASIC, I took a high school course in BASIC, in 1981, and it changed my life. For one thing, it changed my approach to math.
I think that computation should be part of elementary math, not to produce the next generation of career programmers, but because computation is actually how a lot of math is done. And it might change the curriculum -- having students think about more complex problems that they have the tools to solve, rather than learning algorithms by rote.
I speculate that people might have a better grasp of statistics if they could just play around with artificial distributions generated by a computer -- even just in a spreadsheet.
I think that computation should be part of elementary math, not to produce the next generation of career programmers, but because computation is actually how a lot of math is done. And it might change the curriculum -- having students think about more complex problems that they have the tools to solve, rather than learning algorithms by rote.
I speculate that people might have a better grasp of statistics if they could just play around with artificial distributions generated by a computer -- even just in a spreadsheet.