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British Schoolkids To Be Taught Computer Coding
An anonymous reader writes "The UK government has finally decided to do something about the dire state of IT and computer science teaching in the country: it will create a new 'IT-centric' General Certificate of Secondary Education that will cover computational principles, systemic thinking, software development and logic. The current ICT GCSE has been lambasted for boring kids to death with lessons on using Word and Excel, rather than teaching computer programming."
They will find a use for all of those BBC micros that have been lying around for 25 years.
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This is a really good thing. As the summary notes, this will teach kids logic and thinking systematically. Knowing how to program isn't just a useful skill in the direct sense of programming things and possibly being employed that way. It also does a really good job of making one think precisely and carefully. There's also another advantage which is it helps kids appreciate that the technology around them are things they can understand and don't need to treat like they are magic.
I did GCSE computing in 1998, and my coursework was a programming task (modelling the 3-body problem). At my school, however, I'd been taught to program aged 7. If I'd started programming aged 14, I'd have found it a lot harder. The government should be making programming a primary school activity, not leaving it to an optional course later on. Ideally, programming should be the first thing children are taught to do with computers at school - it was for me, and after that everything else is easy.
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I did my IT GCSE in 1999, and came out with an E at the end of it. I hadn't done any coursework at all, as it was just to mind-numbingly painful to dumb down my thinking to give the answer they wanted. The course seriously needed updating.
I'm a network manager in local government now. Goes to show how appropriate what they taught was to the real world.
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Most people don't become programmers by choice. Why force the 99% of kids that would not otherwise have an interest in computers to suffer through some poorly-thought-out introduction to Java?
Actually one in four people has the intrinsic required to become a professional programmer. I took auto mechanics in high school. I'm not an auto mechanic, but it is a useful knowledge set for driving a car. As programming is a useful knowledge set for using a computer.
As for poorly thought out "anything", well, it's poorly thought out, not really relevant to the point you seem to be making.
As for becoming a programmer by choice, I didn't have the opportunity to study computers until university, I found it a terrific and exciting application of logic. I guess I'm not most people in your book, nor are many of the people I've worked with over the years. In fact, I've run into a very few people who program for the money, but don't like it. But anyone who follows a discipline taht they don't really like deserves to be miserable.
I guess in summary, I'd have to say that you haven't got a fsking clue what you are talking about.
I did ICT at GCSE level, and A-Level, both times the course was fairly boring. Particularly the "here is how you create some basic documents" sections. One of the modules was to create a small website - we were allowed to use Dreamweaver, but so the course was somewhat challenging I did it in notepad (got full parks for that module too).
Once I got to University to study Computer Science, I started to learn actual interesting things, including programming (we hadn't done it at school, perhaps a little bit into Excell macros, but nothing major), but there were a lot of people in the first year of the Uni course who were struggling to learn the basic concepts, so improvement in the basics earlier on is definatly needed.
Why force 99% of kids to read classic works of literature? Why force 99% of kids to participate in physical education?
How the hell do they know if they have an interest before they've really been exposed to it? I know people that went from the "something is wrong with my retractable cup holder on my Compaq" camp to discussing the pros and cons of different hardware builds as they designed their newest tower in just a few years. All it took was exposure in a learning environment and patience and the computer stuff they weren't interested in before was a hell of a lot more interesting to them.
I imagine they could make a pretty interesting class in Excel if they'd move beyond formatting cells and doing simple sums and averages. They could even get into macro programming, but even without there's a lot of stuff you can do with it.
Back in my day, when I was bored in school, I would just ditch class to program. During that time, I developed majority of my first engine. Seriously though, I think this is a great idea. Computers are so much part of our lives these days, and will only become even more so, that everyone should know the basics. I find programming also helps you practice other important concepts, like the ability to break apart complex tasks into manageable pieces instead of curling up in a ball and crying.
I the mid to late 80s, when I did my computer science GCEs and A levels, it was a proper computer science curriculum with computer architecture, language theory, machine code, high level languages (basic/pascal/prolog) databases etc. As with the other GCEs and A levels there was a lot of university involvement in setting the exams, so the curriculum led smoothly into the university computer science curriculum.
So this isn't a new thing, just a return to the old thing.
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I think it would be more accurate to say that very few become the kind of programmer they end up as out of choice.
A lot of people want to be programmers because they think of writing fun and exciting software (usually games). What they very quickly find out is that there aren't actually that many jobs in that sort of development; what most of us end up doing is the kind of software that is hidden away behind closed doors, used by only a few people for some internal business task.
Even the softwre I work on now that is used by people outside of my employer is used by a relatively small esoteric group. And I still have to work on code for internal use only.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
When I started secondary school in the early 90's we had BBC Basics in our ICT suite. By the time I left we had PCs. They upgraded the computers but forgot to upgrade the teachers. Our ICT lessons consisted of training the teacher how to make text italic, how to enter data into a spreadsheet or (more frequently) how to mute the sound if he had a hangover. As a consequence none of us bothered to take ICT GCSE.
Why not teach them how to construct geometric proofs instead? And this is a serious question.
The issue I have with teaching computer programing at such a young age is that programing languages tend to be transient. C or JAVA? A few years go it was BASIC vs. Fortran. I have had good C class that taught me theory which I use today – even though I know longer work in C. But if the kids are just learning how to hack – in the bad sense or the word – twisty rabbit warren logic type of code – then I would think more harm than good was done.
I think at that young age there is better ways to beef up their Cognitive skills (Chess, math - Heck – even a Jesuit priest teaching theology)
Name me a job today that requires an education that does not require using a computer.
Knowing how your tools work is the first thing you should learn in any job.
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I learned touch on a typewriter in grade-school and I have benefited me immensely ever since. That's one of the basics they don't but really should teach kids. Some basic bash commands would probably also be very helpful, but that requires them to switch from Wintendo in the educational systems. I never once had need for the meaningless Word lessons I was forced to take. Teaching the programming would be great, but I don't quite get why they would want to teach C or Java or something like that to _all_ children. Giving them useful basic computer skills sounds more meaningful.
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it requires a fair amount of logical and critical thinking skills that public schools don't really cater to
This is public schools catering to logic and thinking, and it is a good thing there's finally something attempting to fill the gap
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Everyone is capable of developing critical thinking skills if they're expected to. When it comes to critical thinking skills, 85% of the population is akin to a feral child. Raise children in an environment where they're not exposed to language, and they'll never learn it. Raise children in an environment where they're not exposed to critical thinking and they'll never learn that either. This has nothing to do with their actual potential.
I'd also argue that programming is a foundational skill. There was a time when keyboarding was a specialized skill, only for secretaries. These days, everyone in every line of work can benefit from some typing skill. The same is true for programming. Everyone has tasks that could be automated, and even just knowing that tasks can be automated can revolutionize the options you have available to you. Even if you never write a program outside of class, flexing your logic muscles and putting together a mental model of what actually goes on in that magic beige box is worth doing.
Hell, go back a couple hundred years and you'll see people making the exact same argument for the exact same reasons about literacy. They were just as wrong then as you are now.
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As someone who came up from machine code through assembler, C, and a variety of high level languages, I used to be a bit snooty about this approach, but now I tend to think "if it is Turing-complete, functional and has the ability to do basic graphics, who cares?"
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Oh now you're getting onto a favorite rant of mine.
I was forced to do French for something like 7 years at school. I can barely speak a word of French today, even though they started us at 9 years old, when we're supposedly very receptive to this sort of thing. I was recently in Belgium, and our hosts took us out to dinner and the subject of learning languages came up. It turns out our host speaks not only English fluently, but also two other languages, and can get by in one more. They had mandatory language classes at school, too. They are a LOT more successful at it.
A lot of people draw a conclusion from this, that English speakers just aren't good at learning other languages, but this is actually a load of rubbish. English speakers are as good as anyone else at acquiring lanugage, but it's the ghastly way languages are taught at school that's the problem. Languages should be fun to learn. They should also not be hugely difficult, after all, learning language is a fundamentally basic human function. But the method of teaching language in Britain, at least my exposure to it, was turned into an incredibly boring chore. (A bit like how ICT is taught now, it seems). No wonder so many Brits are bad at foreign languages, their first exposure is learning French in the most dull manner possible, contrived to make it difficult to learn the language, giving us the impression that learning languages is really hard. The people who came out speaking French well did so in spite of their French lessons, not because of them.
And it hasn't changed. The way students are taught means they still don't learn French in a meaningful way despite being able to get good GCSE grades. An item on Radio 4 about 2 years back discussed the subject of language learners (and the lack of interpreters who were native English speakers), interviewed some students who had just done French GCSEs. The interviewer asked an A grade student to describe her morning in French, which for an A grade student should be trivial. She really struggled.
The reason that article caught my attention was that I had at that stage been teaching myself Spanish for about 9 months or so and I was able to describe my morning in Spanish about 100 times better, despite never having a formal lesson in the language. Not only that as I'm in my 30's according to the accepted wisdom I'm not supposed to be able to learn a language well because "I'm too old to learn one" (which is also a bunch of BS too). After 6 months of learning Spanish I had learned more than I ever did of French after 7 years of French at school. Why have I been so much more successful? Because I've been learning the language the fun way, doing relevant things in the language etc. It becomes a lot easier once it is fun. Now after just 3 years of the language I'm at an advanced level (after all I can understand what women in Madrid say, despite their machine-gun delivery!), and I think all I need would be 3 months living in Spain and I'm pretty confident I could convert this to fluency, the only thing that slows me down right now is I don't have enough opportunities to converse.
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When I was at school I did O-Level Computer Studies and we programmed mainly on Commodore PETs, which I absolutely love (I check eBay regularly for them, today included, though I've never bought one yet). We also used BBC Model Bs. The whole thing was about programming, and I loved it. Our teacher used to bring his VIC-20 and then his C64 in, so some of us used to go in early and hang out in the computer room.
Then later these new-fangled GCSEs came along and people started renaming Computer Studies to something. I'd like to know when the change happened, and if it was gradual, or an instant change when GCSEs started (the year after I left the Senior school, so must have been the new starters in September '86).
I'm glad they are going back to the thinking of the late '70s on this one.