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

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.

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.

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: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.