[Hoot Gibson]

I appreciate your point Hoot about having more tech based jobs in the area. That is for sure a way to provide decent jobs in an area where infrastructure is lacking and probably wouldn’t be able to support a ton of manufacturing jobs.

I will say that I have graduated from Johnson Central in the past ten years and they have a pretty solid technology program there. Classes in computer coding, video production, graphic design, etc. But I would doubt that other schools in the area are able to have similar programs as it’s hard for smaller schools to offer very many programs outside of the basic classes. I would love to see a shift to some more technical based classes at the high school level that lead directly to IT related jobs.

I am skeptical that high schools will ever produce many graduates ready to enter the IT field. My point is that there is nothing to stop students and high school graduates from learning technical skills such as programming on their own.

The free software and training materials that are available online is amazing. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and many others offer free software and training on their products and programming languages.

All that is needed to access these tools is a computer and an internet connection and the internet connection does not have to be lightning fast. As I mentioned previously, a complete Raspberry Pi system can be purchased for under $100 and for less than $150 you can by the top Raspberry Pi model with 4 gb of memory, a deluxe case, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, a micro SD card, and a camera. That, plus a monitor, keyboard, and mouse is essentially all a person needs for a basic platform to learn to program. Raspberry Pi computers are often used as the brains for remote controlled cars and robot projects.

I have my Raspberry Pi configured so that I can run it remotely using a Samsung tablet over my WiFi network. I bought it to run digital communication modes on my ham radio using battery power.

There are certainly better software development platforms than a Raspberry Pi, but the cost of equipment necessary to learn programming is small compared to paying for traditional training courses delivered by an instructor. I have found that I don't get much out of instructor led programming classes unless I have already spent some time learning the material on my own before signing up for a traditional class.

Time is by far the biggest expense in learning to program a computer. If a person is unemployed or underemployed but has time to watch 2 or 3 hours of TV a day, then they can afford to learn to program.

Raspberry Pi 4 link:

MAX Raspberry Pi Starter Kit

Sample Free Programming Resources:

Python For Beginners



HTML Tutorial

CSS Tutorial