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Steve Furber On Why Kids Are Turned Off To Computing Classes
nk497 writes "UK computing legend Steve Furber — co-founder of Acorn and ARM designer — believes students are avoiding computing classes because they teach nothing but the boring basics. Currently studying why the number of students signing up for computing has halved in the past eight years, Furber said schools focus too much on teaching kids how to use spreadsheets, word processors and PowerPoint, rather than teaching more challenging areas such as programming. 'What schools are presenting as ICT as an academic subject is very mundane compared with what students know they can do,' he said. 'It's as if maths was just arithmetic or English was taught as just spelling. It's not unimportant that you can do arithmetic or you can spell, but it certainly doesn't open up the whole world of interest and challenge, if that's all you do.'"
About 15 years ago.
I did basic on my C64, and various other things on other machines we had at home. Then we had school computing class which taught us how to size and colour a font, put together a spreadsheet and other such guff.
Later I got a programmable casio calculator and programmed that. Somehow it didn't occur to me to actually go into computers until I was 18. No thanks at all to the school.
The best thing you could do to really educate kids about computing, and not just train them on windows apps is to get them started with 8-bit computers. Yes, BASIC is awful for real development, but it was designed for education and it does this quite well. Removing all the layers of abstraction from modern PCs forces you to really understand what the computer is doing. While the skills aren't directly transferable to modern PCs, the concepts are, and that's what education is all about.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
shit, I even had a programming teacher in college who was typing with 2 fingers.
I've met many programmers that are horrible typists. The two skills do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Computer science was new and wonderful twenty, perhaps thirty years ago. You could learn a large area of the field even in high school. There were things to discover, things to do, things to share.
Then the commodity computer came and software behemoth companies. For almost anything now there are commercial apps which can do whatever you do faster better and at a level of generality you would never imagine. Wanna write a program plot a graph? There's Mathematica which does it in color.
It's very hard to teach anything interesting if the home computer can do it better and faster. The iPhone programming craze did get people interested in programming again, but I guess that's over now.
Computer science has to realize they are now living in reality like other sciences, low attendance, low interest, and students who either get it or don't. I found when I was teaching college math that freshman calc was the worst possible thing to teach. Anybody interested in math would skip it because they got it long ago. So it will be in Computer science.
More like, if maths were just learning to use a calculator. Learning to use a spreadsheet or word processor isn't even about computing. If that passes for computing, then driver's ed could replace physics, and home economics chemistry. It's like they thing that if a computer is involved, it has something to do with computer science. But computers are in almost everything these days.
I am the IT director of a school in the US. I can see first hand that the only thing the "educators" are interested in is training students to use application software. Not only that, it must be the absolute latest version of a certain company's office package. It's so the students will get "real world" training. WTF?
While it indeed is important for students to learn to use these tools, by the time some of these students make it into the workforce, the software that students are trained on (and cost so much money to 'license') is 'obsolete.'
What happened to the concept of teaching concepts? How to produce a document using a word processor and not Microsoft Word 2007? I learned word processing with AppleWorks on an Apple //e. I can churn out a basic document in minutes with any word processor I use. How many kids 'trained' in the exclusive world of Microsoft software will ever be able to do this?
I'm very lucky. The administration in the school I work at is not like this. The administration mostly use Windows machines, but the students and teachers all use a mix of Linux thin clients (LTSP!) and Macs. The office package we use is Open Office.
There is no "IT personnel shortage" until salaries go up.
As I point out occasionally, "Information Technology" is taking the same path that "stationary engineering" did almost exactly a century century ago. In the 1880s, it was a really big deal if you were the one who could get a steam engine and generator to work together and light up a factory, business, or town. By 1910 or so, it was a routine job. Today, there are still about 25,000 stationary engineers in the United States. It's a good union job. There are electrical engineers designing new equipment, but they're nowhere near the user and have completely different training than the people who install and run the stuff.
That's where IT is going, and it's almost there. Don't worry about it. Just use your iPhone like a good little consumer, and buy your software from Microsoft.
One of the big reasons is because work involving computers is highly overvalued, and teachers are highly undervalued. I know that won't be a popular POV on Slashdot, but it's sadly true. Anyone who is even remotely competent as a programmer can pull down amounts of money that make $20,000 - $35,000 a year to start look, well, laughable. The benefits are pretty good, and the vacation time is pretty much unbeatable, but anyone able to understand '>' just isn't likely to bite. Heck, they'd be better off working as the school's IT guy than teaching CS there... a LOT better off.
And it doesn't help matters that CS isn't one of the Big 4, and as such gets shafted right along with other subjects like art and music. One of the best parts about being a teacher is job security and stability... but if you can't even count on that beyond the next time a road needs to be repaved or a school committee member's child comes down with acute spend-a-gazillion-dollars-to-accommodate-me syndrome, then it loses a lot of appeal for decent potential candidates.
For the record, I don't think this is exclusive to CS... journalism, political science, psychology, engineering, and a few others give very little incentive for graduates to take jobs in education. The rewards available from an entry-level job with a basic degree, and the competition for such jobs, simply conspire against it for all but the least competent individuals.
Another reason, and one that probably doesn't help the former, is that we are just now beginning to see a generation of parents, educators, administrators, politicians, etc. who are actually in agreement on the value of technology education. That's the way the power balance is shifting, and demographics ensure that it will inevitably shift completely, but this kind of cultural change takes time. Even now there are a lot of people making decisions about education that will affect students for years to come, who sincerely believe that penmanship is a highly valuable skill warranting a great deal of education and practice (and not just because it is a good exercise for building fine-motor control and hand-eye coordination)... moving ITC beyond "how to open Excel" is just not going to happen overnight.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
They can't teach anything else, most "computer science" teach I had in highschool was almost computer iliterate, shit, I even had a programming teacher in college who was typing with 2 fingers.
Maybe you are just arrogant? It is a common problem among techies, I know I suffered from it in my youth and it did me no favours.
I am now a 36 year old software developer and the big thing I have learnt is how little I know. This is the same in many fields though since each answer always brings with it more questions. The best advice I can give you is to queitly learn as much as you can. Even though your teachers might know nothing about what you think they should know about, you be damn sure they know something and you never know when that something might be useful.
PS - I still type with 2 fingers as I am not willing to take the short term hit on productivity in order to change the habit of the last 27 years (I learnt to code on the ZX Spectrum, not great code granted but it was a start)
I dont read
"how to use spreadsheets, word processors and PowerPoint" are not Computing classes or computing skills. They are examples of office skills and should be classified as Business Courses.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Computers were fun back when the reward was worth the effort. Poking data into the display buffer, writing short bits of code in machine language to open the door of CD drive -- the direct connection between software and hardware -- that's what I liked.
Today the best way to do that is probably to build a robot or some other sort of embedded system. Watching your Lego-bot roll around the floor and respond to input according to your rules is a lot more engaging than calling Qt to put up a button or OpenGL to draw a square.
It's obvious pretty quickly that 'Hello World' isn't exactly the door to Narnia.
Luck you. The "Computer Science" teacher in my high school was actually a math teacher. She actually had the gumption to BAN any kid in the labs who knew more than she did.
Her justification to the principal - and I am not making this up - was that she was afraid "one of them will change something and I won't know how to change it back."
I eventually wound up being a TA for one of my other teachers, helping run one of the educational programs for a foreign language class (Stupid Math Bitch couldn't read the program's text to know how to start it).
"Education" in the US is generally retarded. It doesn't help first that we have a "teach to the level of the slowest retard" (thanks, "no child left behind" laws) mentality, and it REALLY doesn't help that our teachers are paid such shitty wages and required to endure such useless ongoing certification and "continuing education" crap that the vast majority of intelligent people won't go anywhere near the field.
I don't blame the intelligent people for staying out of the field. Being a teacher in America is like signing your own death sentence, you get to work incredibly shitty hours, good luck scheduling a vacation, NO support when you have to deal with troublemaker brats whose parents haven't taught them manners, NO support for removing said troublemakers from the classroom so the rest of the kids can learn, and no support in managing to get the slowest of the slow into their own classes so that the rest of the class isn't spending all day asleep waiting as you spend the 12th straight day trying to get the retards to catch on to what the rest picked up in five minutes.
I wish I was exaggerating but I'm not.
The status of teachers in the US is simple: how do you educate kids when the only teachers you can get have to somehow be smart enough to be able to impart not just knowledge but the concept of learning to the kids, and at the same time, they have to be dumb-shit insane enough to sign up to be teachers in the US with all that comes with it?
Typing and spreadsheets aren't even "computer science", FFS. Spreadsheet skills fall under a broader category of "accounting", and typing is an ancient skill that existed before electricity became commonplace.
Computer science. Good grief.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br