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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!
Sometimes classes are outright outdated. I had a course around 1999 which was supposedly about computer programming. We spent the first few weeks with only lectures and an incredibly outdated textbook. The teacher (an otherwise okay math teacher) was clearly well behind the times. He lectured about microcomputers, minicomputers and had no idea that most servers by then were basically souped up versions of typical desktop computers.
The language was Pascal, which I suppose is a decent learning language, but we barely scratched the surface of programming ability. For a high-school level class, it was tediously outdated and slow. I truly hope that by now the instruction has moved along and kids are doing more interesting things. There were other interesting courses offered in things like graphic design, web design, etc. but the core programming class had neither much CS theory nor interesting applications. Worst, if you didn't know any better the content in the course would actually mislead you about the state of computing.
All subjects have the "boring basics". The key is the instructor; a good instructor can make the basics of a field really interesting. Unfortunately, being a good programming instructor is hard, and at the K-12 level it is really hard.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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.
I had pre-CompSci in 7th and 8th grade, taught by an old mainframer.
He gave us challenging computer science problems. We turned them out on C64s.
When the work was done, out came the joysticks..
Thanks, Barry!
Personally, I'm trying to figure out why the College Board decided to ditch AP Computer Science AB. It covered more advanced CS topics (by high school standards, anyway,) that, ideally, should have served as such screening.
I was fortunate enough to attend the best-funded public school in my state and graduate from it several months ago (though one can easily argue much of the funding simply went to and from the football program, that's a topic for another post) and was also fortunate to get to experience AP-AB CS the last year it was offered. Whereas AP-A CS focused on the basics of Java (perhaps a controversial choice of language, but certainly not the topic of choice here; it worked for me and for those of my classmates interested in learning the basics of programming,) I found that AP-AB introduced more advanced concepts - algorithm efficiency analysis via Big-O notation, the exploration of various data structures, etc.
I feel the class left me unprepared in terms of what it set out to accomplish, but not because of its curriculum - I feel that the blame lies, quite frankly, in the incompetence of the teacher (for future reference, until the AP-AB course was discontinued in 2009, our school offered AP-A and AP-AB CS as consequent courses taught by the same teacher.)
While I am by no means myself an excellent programmer by any stretch of the imagination, perhaps due to some predisposition for the topic matter, I had an easier time understanding the material than many of my classmates. I believe that one factor contributing to this was an immediate dislike of my teacher, which led me to largely ignore the lectures and simply read the corresponding material in our book (if I recall correctly, it was Fundamentals of Java by Lambert and Osborne). I noticed many of my (otherwise very bright) classmates struggling with what seemed to me basic concepts and they began turning to some of my other classmates, who were either already familiar with programming or simply had a knack for picking it up quickly, and myself for help.
The teacher did not only fail to encourage having the kids actually learn something, she actively began to *stop* them from asking for help - both from each other AND from her!
This sort of attitude, combined with a very, erm...'interesting' grading scale (you could easily pass the class if your code was formatted exactly as she specified in terms of white space but didn't work at all the entire year) and, judging by the few lectures I did listen to and the complaints of my classmates, a grip on Java that was tenuous at best, guaranteed that a large number of my classmates who were bright in other subjects and sought to learn basic programming skills turned away from the area for good. (About the one thing fully everyone got from that class was that the teacher was, by all accounts, full of hot air.)
I think the problem lies in that, to weed out unsatisfactory teachers in programming, you'd need to have someone who actually understands the topic at hand involved at the screening, which, given the school I came from, seems unlikely.
TL;DR (because not everyone enjoys a long-winded and rambling essay): I just graduated from high school and took the CS courses available; both the basic and more advanced courses were held back less by their content than by the several levels of incompetence of the teacher (and it's a total shame.)
In this regard anyway. I remember I avoided PC classes all through school. Why waste elective credits on stuff I already knew and listen to a teacher, who can't progam their own VCR, try to tell me how a PC Functions or tell me the way I type is wrong?
Nothing agianst the treachers but in most cases they barely grasp what they themselves are teaching and its going to be a generation or two before this changes because the technology is new and still in a very rapid state of change.
I remember I didn't take a computer class until high school when they started offering A+ and CCNA and such as elective credits. I took keyboarding because it was a prerequesit, they wouln't waive it. The teacher knew nothing about what he was doing and was infurated with me because he gave me what he was sure was a whole periods worth of work to anybody, and I finished it in 5 minutes. I finaly got kicked out of his class when he sent me to the principals office because I would not respond when he called me "BOY!" It was one of those southren types where everyone in his class was either "BOY!" or "Sugar" He wrote me up for being disrespectful because I pointed out I had no idea he was talking to me because there were about 12 other boys in his class.
Luckily the principal realised how stupid it was and waived the requirement since I obviously could already type faster than I could talk.
pffft, I type with my dick. The only problem is that balls keep pushing the space-bar.
You can't handle the truth.
"iliterate"
You don't say.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
Irony alert... irony alert... Irony level has been set to MAUVE.
In the event that additional typos are detected in a post regarding touch-typing ability, please be aware that the irony level may be raised to FUSCHIA. Please ensure your irony preparedness kits are completely stocked, and stay tuned for further announcements.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What language can be written entirely with only the bottom row of the keyboard?
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
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
Whitespace.
Brainfuck.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
"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.