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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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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.
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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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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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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