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?"

Comments

It shouldn't be mandatory

[elrous0]

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).

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[SJHillman]

Way back in 6th grade, we did "programming" with LogoWriter as a topic of our overall computer class (along with the basics like word processing, basic file management, Oregon Trail and of course typing). It was a nice introduction to programming that was suitable to that level of schooling. We were also given enough leeway to play around with variables and try new things that it piqued the interest of almost everybody. However, and entire class on just programming may be a bit much. Maybe offer programming as an alternative to having to take a foreign language (why is that mandatory anyway?).

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[Nursie]

Except these things have such a huge presence and impact on the modern world that a mandatory intro to understanding and programming them is a damn good idea.

Besides which, computer science is not necessarily vocational, it's also an academic and theoretical science.

"You can't MAKE a great programmer any more than you can MAKE a great engineer, mechanic, etc?"

No, but you can make sure they get exposed to it, like we do with sciences, languages and literature.

Those with a true passion for it will actively seek it out

And this is where you fail. They may know nothing about it.

Besides which, if you read TFA you'd find out this isn't several years course resulting in exams, just a replacement to the current braindead "Here is how to open a document in word, here is how to change a font" bullcrap that's passed off as "Computer Education" in British schools at present.

Examined courses (GCSE at 14-16, A-Level at 16-18) will still be optional. If I'd known about programming (other than C64 Basic) when I was 12 I'd have been all over that, as it was I didn't really start until university at 18. This is a very, very good thing.

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[sandytaru]

The most programming I did when I was in primary and secondary school was using the simplified form of BASIC to write programs for our TI-82 calculators. The best part of that? If we were successful in programming our calculators, we were permitted to use them to crunch equations for our physics and math classes. If we screwed up the programming, we screwed up the tests. But if we were successful in coding the programs, then we'd score well on the tests. The trick was that all programming had to occur within classes just before the test; no transferring or copying programs from calculator to calculator the night before. (We had to leave them in the classrooms overnight before tests.) This served two major functions: It taught us the guts of the equations, and it taught us some of the most essential raw programming skills. One girl did such an amazing job with her physics programs that she scored a one hundred percent on the final exam, a first in the history of the school.

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[SpinyNorman]

Some basic undrestanding of computers isn't really vocational - nowadays they are so pervasive (in all your gadgets as well as computers themselves) that it's really basic knowledge. I'd put knowledge of how computers work (incl. basic programming) in the same class as something like physical geography (how mountains, glaciers form, etc)... If you want to understand the world around you then these are basics you need to know... it's more a matter of foundational knowledge than vocational training.

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[John Courtland]

I'm personally of the opinion that the vast majority of modern white collar jobs are going to require some form of computer programming in the very near future. For example, my wife works in supply chain and the ridiculous shit they do because they are simply ignorant of even 50 year old computing methods cause them to waste a considerable amount of time and resources. It's not uncommon either, people get in a rut doing repetitive, computationally simple tasks because they don't know any better. Those kinds of jobs are doomed and I think that in order to be competitive or even hire-able you will need to know how to automate the minutiae.

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[Bert64]

Same in the UK, they don't start until secondary school (equivalent of high school i guess), and are pretty basic (Teaching you how to order a cup of coffee in french or german)... And you will almost never encounter the language you learn anywhere but school.

In other countries where the primary language is not english, then english is generally taught in schools at quite an early age and is likely to be encountered regularly through the internet and on television...

People from Holland tend to speak very good english because most of the shows on tv are in english with dutch subtitles, teaching them both the meaning and (usually american) pronunciation of the words in an environment that's actually interesting for them...

A classroom is a terrible place to learn anything, you have a dull rigid environment which causes you to mentally switch off, combined with other kids who are there by force not choice and who can easily disrupt anyone who is actually trying to learn.

Re:It shouldn't be mandatory

[rev0lt]

About two decades ago, electricity and carpentry were mandatory disciplines in the 7th and 8th grade. I'm not a carpenter, but I can use the basic toolset, operate a tower drill and a table saw, do woodwork finishing with sandpaper and apply varnish if I need to. I learned it in school. Knowing how to exchange a wall socket is a bit like knowing how to change a flat tire - it is potentially dangerous, but you'll save yourself a lot of time and money if you actually know how to do it.
The same idea applies to plumbing - shure, complex stuff should be left to the professionals, but exchanging a connection pipe or installing a faucet is not more complex than using a cellphone or a computer browser, and everyone should know how to use them.

Pixel function multiplies interest in programming

[Twinbee]

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.

Wrong sponsors

[vlm]

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.

And not before time!

[asdf7890]

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!

Re:Nice idea but...

[RogueyWon]

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.