This is interesting, but I'm not certain there need be an institution with just a heavy interest on software engineering. The article suggests that there are those who may not be proficient at other academic pursuits, but may have a keen interest in software engineering.
To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this.
Plus there are added benefits to learning english, the arts, maybe a foreign language - I feel all of these have an impact on the type of person you become, perhaps even the type of software engineer you become. Just like it is with medical school - in many countries you go to medical school straight from high school, but here you complete 4 years of college first. In those four years you learn certain things which med school won't cover and which you may never be able to learn at any point again - but they could have a significant impact on the type of doctor you become, esp in how you interact with your patients.
I feel the same applies to any career choice, including software engineering.
To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this
I might be a special case but for what it's worth: I didn't start programming until I was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School. I took the intro course on a whim and was hooked. If the computer science program didn't exist, I might not have gotten into it. I was more into art than math/cs back then. I didn't have much of an environment to discover that I loved programming before that, and I bet many other kids don't either.
