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."

Comments

Not just for jobs

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:Not just for jobs

[maxwell demon]

But will they continue it when they notice that those pupils are then able to think not only about algorithms, but also about the stuff politicians tell?

Re:Not just for jobs

[gandhi_2]

I agree.

I tell people all the time, a little bit of programming experience goes a long way.

It isn't just about being a programmer by trade. You come across problems now and then in Excel that can't be solved any other way besides some VBA. Maybe you don't know VBA, but if you understand logical program flow, objects, etc... some Google will get you the rest of the syntax. My Biologist wife and I had to sit down and get her going with R. A few times in the Army I've had to process a shit-ton of text data and a perl script came in handy. A little programming knowledge has helped me out many times in normal life. I'm no programmer.

We all probably have tons of examples where just programming literacy and understanding of systematic thinking and logical flow have come in super handy. Just learning how to abstract a problem, break it into parts, and turn it into an algorithm.... forget the code, that is educational. Kids *should* be exposed to this. It will give them skills that will serve them well later.

Too Late

[TheRaven64]

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.