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British Schoolchildren To Get Programming Lessons
judgecorp writes "The British Education Secretary Michael Gove has said that the school ICT curriculum will be scrapped and replaced with programming and real computer science. Britain's schoolchildren have had compulsory ICT (information and communications technology) lessons for some time, but they are hated by staff and pupils alike, amounting to little more than Power Point training, using the products rather than understanding the code. There is room for improvement — and the British-designed Raspberry Pi could be part of this, but can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?"
the current ICT curriculum will be scrapped in September this year, to be replaced by compulsory lessons in computer science and programming.
While I appreciate the need to expose students to computer classes in the same way they're exposed to other subjects, I don't think that something as specific as programming should be a *mandatory* requirement. Programming is a vocation, like many vocations, that some people are cut out for and other people are not. Those with a true passion for it will actively seek it out and those with no interest in it will hate it no matter how many programming classes you force them take. You can't MAKE a great programmer any more than you can MAKE a great engineer, mechanic, etc. Someone has to WANT it first. And forcing someone to take a programming class isn't going to make them a better programmer, any more than forcing me to take a class in shop is going to make me a better carpenter.
I think vocational classes should always be optional. Expose the kids to it, fine. Talk about vocations like programming in mandatory classes, but ultimately let the kids CHOOSE the optional classes based on their interests. The idea that you can turn your country into a tech giant just by forcing kids to take programming classes is ridiculous (if anything, you'll create a country that RESENTS programming).
Offer the classes, make them intensive and varied, and let the kids who WANT to be programmers come to YOU (and they will).
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I hope that the plot(x,y,r,g,b) function is featured as part of their lessons, because that can easily multiply a student's interest by a factor of 10.
There's nothing quite like being able to control any part of the screen. When I started off on the ZX spectrum, I was just drawing dots, lines and circles. And it looked rubbish, but it felt amazing, especially when animation came into play. Today, I'm doing more this kind of stuff, but at the heart of it is the plot(x,y,r,g,b) function.
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If this is well done then it will be great. If not, then it will be a disaster.
So... here's hoping they don't cock it up.
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can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?
Sponsors are fine. The correct sponsors for a programming curriculum are my personal favorites microchip.com and xilinx.com, not The Mighty GOOG and MS. Give the kids a Spartan-3 FPGA starter kit, a PIC32MX1 starter kit, and a whole lot of tabs of acid, or at least 2 of the 3, and they'll do just fine.
Note that a "real CS curriculum" is a lot of discrete math and database theory (Codd normal forms, etc) so about 50% to 75% of a real CS curriculum just needs a whiteboard, no hardware, and optionally a box set of Knuth. This confuses the hell of out people who can't tell the difference between IT and CS, just like its easy to confuse the hell out of people who can't tell the difference between education and training.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And not before time!
Though please don't rush overly on my account Mr Gove: one of the advantages of the current system from my PoV is that it wasn't training up any young enthusiastic replacements for me, so I might be able to keep my career moving when I get old(er) and (more) belligerent!
Programming is not a fundamental skill in the same sense that mathematics, English, etc. are. It's a specific vocational skill. Sure you can learn some underlying skills from it, in the same way that you can learn underlying skills from any vocational training. You can learn some logic from a mandatory programming class, some physics from a mandatory engineering class, some fluid dynamics from a mandatory mechanic class, some geometry from a mandatory carpentry class, etc. But none of those are going to make you into a programmer, engineer, mechanic, or carpenter.
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but can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?"
Yes, it can, but whether it will or not is probably an open question, especially on Microsoft's part. Both Google and Microsoft have a vested interest in creating the software developers of the future, but I can see Microsoft having a hard time not trying to use the opportunity to create more Microsoft product users at the same time.
Included with the OLPC computers for children was Scratch, referenced in the article. Even Google App Inventor for android was based on it. For me looked lgreat, something that even a primary school children could use to do from very small to somewhat complex things. Also included are turtle art, a logo interpreter (simpler, but is so close scratch to it that not sure if worth teaching it) and a python interpreter (but it should be for more advanced/grown up childrens). Something like this should be adopted in schools, not particulary to teach about computing and programming, but on thinking, solving problems in ordered ways.
The vast majority of UK teachers "delivering ICT curriculum" are late-middle aged business studies teachers only capable of showing kids where the bold button is and this is the fundamental problem.
Even that phrase should terrify you - they deliver the curriculum (i.e. hand out workbooks) and then patrol the shop floor for slackers and the curriculum is "ICT". Something so divorced from real computing its got its own TLA that only really exists in education.
There are exceptions of course, real geeks with a passion for the subject trying to push the boundaries, but the fact that the ones driving this forward seem to be totally unaware of them just makes the whole thing look even worse:
"we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations"
We already do - and more, Kodu , Alice, Muvizu and thats just the free ones I can think of off the top of my head.
I've been to conferences filled with these people bemoaning the death of computing and asking "what's gone wrong". They've usually even got one of the innovators doing a "look what I'm doing with the kids!" presentation that's lapped up by the audience. Not one of them takes it any further.
I went to an (otherwise excellent) private school in the UK, in the early/mid 1990s. What was striking at the time was how much worse the quality of the IT teaching was compared to that in other subjects. For most of my time there, IT (which was only mandatory from ages 11-13) was taught by an elderly priest with no computing knowledge, following a script sent out by some course provider.
While I'm sure we were well below the level of many slashdotters, my friends and I were significantly more computer literate than him. We'd been messing around with DOS, clearing up EMS and conventional memory to get our games to run for years (a couple of years later, we'd be enthusiastically pulling together Doom .wads and Duke Nukem 3d mods). Despite being among the "good kids" in the school in behavioural terms 99% of the time, we ended up so bored in those lessons (while he tried to teach basic word processing) that we ended up causing all kinds of havoc on the school PCs (completely undetected) and disrupting lessons no end (all while looking innocent and helpful).
When I went into the sixth form (16-18, for the benefit of non-UK readers), they got somebody in "from industry" to teach IT - and made a once-weekly half-hour IT class mandatory for everybody. Of course, the guy they'd got in "from industry" turned out to have been a factory floor manager in a PC assembly plant. He knew no more about the subject he was supposed to be teaching than the priest. The lessons came down to him reading instructions from a printed script (again provided by some faceless course-provision company) on how to create Word and Powerpoint documents. By this point my friends and I had brushed up our skills no end and were capable of causing even more creative havoc (again, always undetected).
Things may have improved since then, but there was a long way to go from a position where a school that would have been comfortably among the top 10% in the UK didn't even know the skills it needed in an IT teacher, let alone how to design a curriculum.
Well my friend who does the maths teaching, despite degrees in Mech Eng and Comp Sci (and now a PGCE as well) just didn't really get on in the corporate world. Teaching is the family business (his folks were teachers at our school), he got good grades when he was at school, good degrees and he seems to enjoy it... Economics don't seem to figure too much in his life-decision making thoughts.
You and I may not hang up our developers hats, and he may not have a huge amount of commercial programming experience, but neither of those things mean kids (in at least that school) couldn't get a good intro to programming.
I suppose some basic level of programming say scripting may be useful. Today there is almost no job (in the west) that does not involve some sort of data processing and tasks involving data processing devices which can be simplified by use of said scripting. This and some basic statistics so that the kids have basic foundations for intelligent ignoring of nonsense pumped into our brains by media, politicians etc.
Nice idea, but are you going to find X thousand teachers capable of teaching programming by September? or be able to *properly* train the current ones?
I assume if they are working up the new curriculum now, it will be ready in a couple of months (if you're lucky), which gives you about 3 months to distribute the curriculum to schools before they all go off on their summer holidays. 12 weeks then to get the teachers up to speed on the new courses.
I am not saying it's impossible - teachers are amazing, and incredibly dedicated. But declaring you're going to teach something which isn't currently being taught has a lead in time to get the schools up to speed. Or expect the teachers to work their evenings and weekends on an extra unpaid task (which will mean you will get highly variable results).
Unless of course you throw a major company like Microsoft or Google a blank cheque, tell em to take as much money as they want and give you a bunch of passwords to some website (probably based on a foreign country's curriculum, e.g. USA, which might not align with the UK curricula) and get your students to drag themselves through some automated lessons.
I think its political rhetoric. It can be done, and it would be cool to give some students programming skills, but I think it will take more than a few months to change the education system for a whole country and retrain the teachers.
I'm an ICT teacher who was roped into doing it (I'm 70% science, chem/phys, 30% ICT now). It has almost exclusively been excel and powerpoint training which is deadly dull. I enjoy programming in my spare time but nothing extensive (BASIC on the speccy, then VB when I got a PC, and am getting into C with the use and help of my Arduino). I also do CGI, with PS, modeling, animation, etc etc as well as HTML, flash coding and just about any other bits n peices I come across
For so long ICT has been MS based. There are some exceptions - scratch is a simple programming language that is used in a small way for example. I doubt the capability of ICT teachers with programming and CS. I mean, I do electronics and programming as a hobby but do I have the extensive knowledge to teach it right? Unsure, but I bet I could punch through it. Other ICT teachers I'm not so sure about. I'm a fairly stereotypical geek with some social ability.
If you're a decent coder and EE, why would you go into teaching? From the sciences (like me) I can understand - very low pay, low reward to work ratio. You'd do it for the love of it. If you're a decent coder you should be coding I'd say. I don't think we have the body of people to teach it in this country.
But I hope it does change and I get to have a crack at it!
In the same way that algebra is basically a vocational class...
Only basic levels of mathematics can be considered a fundamental skill... Most of what they teach will be of absolutely no use whatsoever to most people during their adult lives.
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No, but it stands a good chance of teaching pupils how to give and receive instructions. There is a major problem in the UK with school leavers who cannot follow simple instructions like "open the text book and turn to page 10" - they will open some other book, or turn to some other page, or do something else entirely. This makes them unemployable - hence the need to import a large number of Polish workers to do menial tasks.
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I got my first job teaching computing in a high school, for the 15-18 year old groups. And yes, I probably got that job because the school's administration thought it was a dummy subject: I was 20 year old by then, and had absolutely no knowledge on how to stand in front of a group of 20 bored kids and keep their attention. That was, yes, the main reason that made me fail as a teacher.
However, there is another important reason: I was told to teach them Office software. The problem was, I was only mildly familiar with it. Yes, I had done some nice stuff with a word processor - but my Excel knowledge was very low. And it took me quite a bit to understand what was Powerpoint all about.
Yes, today we have loads of Office teachers. But they came from *somewhere*, didn't they? And if the curriculum changes, probably it will not be them who are best suited to teach - They might be better off as office assistants as a general case. There are people with qualifications needed to teach basic programming. Some of them might be frustrated current teachers trying to teach something more interesting than the way to color Excel cells.
If you can't follow and obey the logic behind "open the text book and turn to page 10" I really doubt you're going to get much benefit from a programming class.
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