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Microsoft Wants Computer Science Taught In UK Primary Schools
Qedward writes "As the UK prepares to shake up the way computer science is taught in schools, Redmond is warning that the UK risks falling behind other countries in the race to develop and nurture computing talent, if 'we don't ensure that all children learn about computer science in primary schools.' With 100,000 unfilled IT jobs but only 30,500 computer science graduates in the UK last year, MS believes: 'By formally introducing children to computer science basics at primary school, we stand a far greater chance of increasing the numbers taking the subject through to degree level and ultimately the world of work.'"
More at 11.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Do they want Computer Science or Computer Technology, because I doubt primary children are capable of Computer Science.
And it wants those products used at an age where extra-friendly products have an advantage. Specifically GUI environments, not command lines.
not all IT work is CS and not all of it needs to be at the degree level.
I think they don't know that 90% of times people that aren't interested in programming/IT on their own (especially in this computer-centered age) will make lousy coders/testers/etc. Just look at people who went into IT for the money, read their code or ask them how a computer works (even if this was explained to them in University i doubt they know)
You're right. Only work that matters needs to be. Face it, the days when aspies in basements could make a difference are over (Linus was the end). It's all about R+D labs and corporations and if you thing otherwise you're a fool.
Getting computing taught correctly at GCSE level (14-16) should be the main priority, rather than primary schools. That said, I do think teaching children from a young age about logical reasoning and methodical processes would be very useful for many activities in later life, including computer science.
MS believes: 'By formally introducing children to Windows basics at primary school, we stand a far greater chance of increasing the numbers using it through the rest of their lifes'
Joking.. My first computer was a Philips VG8010 (MSX Basic) and I'm perfectly sane! Now excuse me I need to order all my pencils by length and then do my daily naked run in the streets.
The Internet was invented by Americans for America (US DARPA), and it will remain the province of Americans to guide its development and harness its infrastructure and underpinnings. This technology is way, way beyond what most foreigners can handle, and clearly beyond what a bunch of poofters can manage. We kicked them out of our country lo 200+ years ago after dragging their red coats up and down the hills and valleys of this great land. Keep the Internet American.
ESR, PhD
Logic and information theory. If, and, or, xor, union, intersection, and other set theory are some topics at the very heart of computer science that could easily be boiled down to M&M demonstrations for kindergarteners. I see no reason why a basis for logic and argument should not be planted at a young age.
Readers,
Before you go knocking Microsoft (ahem: first post), realize that this is really important. Education standards here in the United States are just now being revised (see: the Common Core. Math and English Language Arts, and soon, Science, will be released. Most states have, or will, adopt these measures.
However, by looking through the coming standards, it's clear that while abilities such as critical thinking are addressed, skills and conceptual understanding of the many computational methods that we use daily (as knowledge workers) are left out.
Computing in the Core is looking to make a significant change, but my contention is that we need to focus on more than only computing; we also need to focus on the various important literacy skills, including media, information, data, and network literacy. How many people in the United States actually understand basics about how the Internet works, or about how to make sense of, or read, datasets or visualizations? These are all essential and fundamental skills for a 21st century individual.
Realize that recruiters and many others recognize these needs, and have asked your support - tacit or explicit - to bring expertise to bear in addressing the educational challenge.
--Dave
Don't want a repeat of confusing Win8 interface. :-)
Computer science? Or beginning MCSE?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
... primary schools do NOT give degrees!
No comment.
Rubbish. UK companies are falling over themselves to outsource all IT to the cheapest possible bidder, which excludes anyone living in the UK. I advise anyone interested in Computer Science to look elsewhere - aside from the fact that almost no one wants to invest in anything other than property or financial fiddling, no one will want to pay you enough to make the investment worthwhile.
Everyone knows the goal is to get users hooked as young as possible. Schools have small budgets, Adding more Raspberry Pi seats is way cheaper than adding more seats with Microsoft Windows. Microsoft may have a hard time.
could fill a $5000/yr position requiring 20 years of CouchDB experience and expert fluency in thirty different programming languages.
You're missing the point -- many technology skills underlie MANY professions.
An entry-level coordinator needs to know how to interface with Salesforce, and to build new Salesforce objects. This requires a basic understanding of data, and how it's stored. Other entry-level positions require understanding of charts and graphs, or about how to search for information effectively (example: a legal assistant). In an increasingly digitized world, many of these skills underlie most professions.
--Dave
The UK clearly needs more Indians or .
True, but like it's a waste of time to teach science before the kids have learned mathematics, it's also the optimal order in IT to teach the theory first.
There's a vibrant, and growing by leaps and bounds, Linux community in Ireland. They're quite good, and I've told my former contracting sites in London to look closer to home than the MCSE's that are coming out of India and their own London school systems.
Microsoft has lost mindshare with teenagers who are all turning to Apple products, so they're going to try to indoctrinate students at an earlier age.
That's all this is about. MS thinks that programming childrens minds at a young age to 'Windows' that they'll be able to keep the sinking ship afloat. What they're missing is a workable operating system. It doesn't matter how early you program someone with something terrible, it's still terrible.
It works for Apple because the products provide more utility than they take from you. Apple products are liberating, Microsoft products are painstaking. Address that first, worry about selling the products when there's something worth selling.
100,000 unfilled IT jobs
Hey /. UK people is that true or false? In the US our unfilled job position news reports are lies, all lies. If there really are 0.1M job openings in the UK I'd think I'd have heard about it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you think MS is in any danger, you haven't seen the backlog of expensive (thousands of $$$ is volume licensing), unmaintainable (no source code or documentation) and mission critical (only way to run a piece of equipment / interface with a system) applications that require a version of Windows to run. That alone will keep them going into the foreseeable future.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
The method rather than the hardware and software.
Leave that to Secondary and Tertiary education stages.
Binary is useful since it is the backbone of the entire system.
Ternary and Quaternary are also useful for encoding states in software using some simple bitwise operations. *
Base16 also.
Base32 and 64 being another 2.
And one that is sadly underused, and some here will even be new to it, base91.
Learning about logic comparisons, will equally help them in maths in general.
Some of the basic hardware used in this logic, such as resistors and transistors being pretty much the backbone of all computer logic.
Single core and multicore. The reasons for that, as an extension of introductory science. (the long story short being that leakage is killing smaller circuit designs, so adding new cores to allow multiple processing operations at the same time, and also the problems in that it adds even more complexity to the timing of computer programming)
General stuff like that.
Don't go beyond the basics, that is for Secondary to do.
Kids are being overwhelmed as it is. Getting them an early interest in computing is good, but don't over-complicate it. Just make them sound cool and magical. That will get all the kids interested.
Also 1 of those 15,000 Raspberry Pis running their own programs.
* One I read up on recently was using ternary for encoding 3 separate textures to a tilesheet and having those tiles be neighbour-sensitive so it automatically places the right texture next to each other to look natural, rather than blocky textures we are used to
Bitwise tilemapping
It is a good read if you like this topic. Very simple and elegant.
Being locked into a walled garden is liberating?
I say this as a person with a macbook air, not running OSX though. Apple has marketing, MS has ballmer and few people care about liberation or freedom.
My school was all Apple. It had the exact opposite effect of persuading me to use Apple computers in my daily life. The last thing I wanted as a kid was the buggy, slow systems at school.
if that is actually true (ya right), the UK could start to adopt the 'outsource-first' policy like its former colony. seems to work well here, we have so many native underpaid, underemployed IT workers it's ridiculous. thanks to the high visa quotas and lower wages that those foreigners will work for just to get their feet on our soil, we have IT graduates with work experience flipping burgers because they can't find a job in their field.
'A massive national and international organized plan to privatize education has been implemented over several decades. Billionaires, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and the Pearson corporation among others, have infiltrated hundreds of governmental bodies including school boards, city councils and our local, state and regional governments. They seek to turn our education system into a profit center worth tens of billions of dollars`.
When he was trying to get schools in the U.S. to train more children to be able to work in a world with IT. But all Bill was really trying to do was get schools scared about falling behind in their technology knowledge and then have Microsoft save the day by selling school districts a whole bunch of Windows software. At an educational discount of course. Bill Gates is not your friend and doesn't care about anyone's kids IT knowledge.
I can safely say that my UK based university was bought by Microsoft. It's pathetic.
You are forced to submit papers written with MS Office, even though Turnitin is well capable of dealing with submissions that were created with Libre/OpenOffice, or even PDF (LaTeX anyone?). But noooooo... it sure MUST be MS Office. Microsoft advertisement throughout campus is absolutely everywhere. It's sickening, and as a long time GNU/Linux user I am very upset at the lack of flexibility my fellow classmates demonstrate. They are literally conditioned to use MS products through and through.
Am I to believe the UK has 69,500 unfilled IT positions right now? If that were true, why wouldn't they start importing all the hundreds of thousands of unemployed IT folks in the US?
Am I to also believe that they graduate over 30,000 computer science students each year?
I call BS.
Ken
but hinder IT in almost every country of the world!
OS X at 7.06% has barely bested the market share maintained by MS Vista 5.67%, and is but a fraction of the ten year-old OS Windows XP at 39.08%.
Microsoft is not hurting.
Ken
So a future crop of IT professionals will be well versed on Microsoft products instead of open source, standardized technologies. I hate it when corporations try and play educators.
Being locked into a walled garden is liberating? I say this as a person with a macbook air, not running OSX though.
Hahaha, congratulations on your purchase. I hope that your macbook air serves you well into the future xD
Microsoft is not hurting.
Apple desktop market share: ~7%
Apple market value: 429 billion
Microsoft desktop market share: ~90%
Microsoft market value: 233 billion
You're right, hurting isn't the right word. Probably the right way to look at it is 'not succeeding as well as possible'. I think Ballmer would agree.
Being locked into a walled garden is liberating?
Yes.
Because software licensing and developer asspain is of absolutely no concern to the vast, vast majority of people on the planet.
You grab an iPod, or more likely, an iPhone - shit just works. You can't figure it out? You go to the Apple store and they show you what's what.
Compared to a Zune (did they kill those, yet?) or a Windows Phone, yeah, it is liberating - your technology serves you, not the other way around.
yes some base line is needed but not loads of theory to point of not knowing about other skills.
Also do you really need to a theory based file system class to work on desktop class. And no it's not a NTFS class or a class about networking / file permissions in area of setting them up.
So Salesforce is the only platform out there? You're in HR aren't you? It's ok to admit it - that is the first step to healing.
The task you describe has nothing to do with understanding data or how it is stored. That's kind of the whole point of a good CRM user interface. All that interacting with Salesforce requires at entry level is being able to follow directions and the checklist your manager gives you.
...by reposting useless double-spaced lists and not addressing the relevant (if negative) comment you're supposedly replying to?
Is it really that cynical that the parent and grandparent posts seem to opine that Google is doing something about UK education and Microsoft is chiming in that it should be done differently, in a way that favors their products?
Sounds find to me, as long they teach real CS, and don't just teach Word and Excel and Powerpoint. It constantly frustrated me that my little sister's computer classes where never anything more than "Make a presentation in Powerpoint". Microsoft should work to put an end to that being the end-all of computer education. That should only be a small part.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is obvious marketing by MS to get youngsters indoctrinated into Microsoft products as early as possible.
If they were happy with open source products, e.g linux in schools, instead, then would be more believable.
Given how many computing devices that exist around us all day long, and how many we're likely to interact with (speaking globally here), I see no reason why everyone by the time they graduate high school shouldn't be required to at least write simple programs. It's unreasonable to expect that computing won't be with us for the future and likely playing a much more pertinent role than it does now.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
wasn't there a guy who said that he only hired english language students because computer science students couldn't communicate or do basic logical reasoning effectively? when working in teams, the ability to reason and communicate is far more important. so this guy, i can't remember who he was (anyone find a link?) said that he found it much more effective to hire people with good english language skills and to train them to program, than to try to hire people who could program and to try to get them to speke engleeeesh.
the advantage of that approach - if microsoft actually encouraged english to be taught at schools - would be that kids would actually learn like, y'know, quite a bit more than just how to program? and i could begin to get a little less stressed and have to refer people to this kind of site: http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html
Maybe CS is a better way to teach mathematics. I never had any use for math till someone asked me how I could solve certain problems using a computer. Suddenly math became interesting.
I think one of the big problems with Math is that kids (and most people) don't know where they are going with all these abstract constructs, whereas programming gives you an immediate use for abstractions.
Also, kids struggle learning basic algorithms like long division but knowing about algorithms and being able to express them with some "language" then maybe they'll have an easier time learning them. Note for example that long division or square roots (or nth roots) are basically modified simple search algorithms.
Most of what students "memorize" in math is odd algorithms but they fail to understand their purpose or source.. CS can do a lot to make things clearer.
I'm just wondering where the money for this is going to come from, since MSFT uses the fictional allocation of IP patents and licenses to Ireland to avoid paying UK and EU taxes, as well as the London tax havens.
You want education?
Pay your taxes.
So google announces handing out thousands of Raspberry Pis to schools here in the UK. Pis that run linux, the parent of Android. So Microsoft has to fight back by promoting IT too at schools - presumably Windows based IT
Market value numbers and stock prices are useless and are at best perception, If you think other wise I have some nice home-mortgage figures circa 2007-2008 you might be interested in.
Apple Total Assets: around $57.6B
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL&fstype=ii&ei=w6YJUcijFqLx0gHBvAE
MS Total Assets: around $85B
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii&ei=AKcJUYjlFfCy0QGc7QE
The stock market is gambling, Just because i can insert $.25 in slot machine and (maybe) win $20M doesn't make my quarter worth $20M if i win.
It works for Apple because the products provide more utility than they take from you. Apple products are liberating, Microsoft products are painstaking.
You may be a bit off with your assessment, because I remember what using those iMacs were like in school, back before OSX. Do you remember how slow it was to boot up? The way CDs could get jammed in the drive? The inevitable crashes when trying to run Photoshop or Pagemaker, which not only lost all your work but also typically brought the entire system down with it? The hand-crampingly awful puck mouse? I do, and it made me avoid Macs like the plague a whole decade.
there has always been, and always will be, a "massive shortage" of qualified XYZ workers in any industry, according to the industry leaders. it doesnt matter if its welding or teaching or nursing or... especially, IT. they actually pay PR companies to go on tours and promote this idea. they pay ad agencies to say these things on tv and in newspapers.
even as they are laying off people and firing people, and even as they are bleeding money, and as their competitors are doing the same, they clamor for more free profits on the backs of the taxpayer - thats what education is in schemes like this - a way for huge corporations to pawn off their training budgets onto the backs of the people who pay for education - you and me.
schools are supposed to teach about learning. you can pick up the CS stuff pretty easily once you have studied, i dont know, music, geometry, math, etc. Microsoft doesnt want people to learn general skills or self sufficiency (theyd use linux), they want people to be forced to learn Excel shortcuts and how to do mail merge in Word and how Outlook calendars are the greatest thing ever. But thats not 'education', thats 'training' - which corporations that have billions of dollars of highly payed executive are supposed to hire a training department to train their employees for.
Nobody needs to learn how to swipe the windows 8 panel at age 5 - that panel will be gone by the time they are old enough to have a job anyways.
"As part of our contribution, the foundation took an important first step a few weeks ago and selected a vendor to build the open software that will allow states to access a shared, performance-driven marketplace of free and premium tools and content".
Either you have no real world experience or you've been very lucky in your career. I've met hundreds of people who can more or less about get by just doing things monkey style.
If you haven't seen them, just change something incredibly trivial - they'll be the ones griping that "we can't do anything, nothing works any more" or running around screaming that the sky is falling in.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
True, but like it's a waste of time to teach science before the kids have learned mathematics
Not true, because they can learn them together. For instance, I have taught a group of 3rd graders (8 years old) to program with Turtle Logo, and taught them about angles, distances, and rotations simultaneously. They use a GUI to put together their programs, including simple loops and conditionals. The output is a cool drawing on their tablets. The kids love it, and they see how learning the math is actually useful. The math is something that comes alive on their screen, rather than something sterile on a sheet of paper.
> Microsoft Wants Computer Science Taught In UK Primary Schools
Good idea. We need to introduce our kids to the new generation of Android devices
I had the same experience, but my point was that CS is mathematics, thus should come before more specific IT fields.
A million halfwits are about to cry "but why don't they make a statement about American schools?".
Protip: Microsoft UK isn't the same thing as Microsoft, nor do they have the same responsibilities or motives.
Fucking Americans.
And ARM architecture. And Alan Turing. They are falling behind in CS? Really?
Microsoft is probably panicking that 30,000 new CS graduates won't be enough MCSEs to keep the UK's Windows systems running.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have long been an advocate of teaching computing at school — hell, I'm sure I'm not the only one in this forum that started off with programming over 25 years ago, in what seemed a trivial thing back then but definitively changed my life!
But the main reason to teach computing is IMO *not* to create more, better programmers, graduated earlier. It should be a core subject of study, just as algebra, philosophy, natural sciences or language.
Programming teaches kids a different way to think, to look at a problem, to form and to transmit the solution — Thinking algorithmically. Programming will also greatly help a kid be more profficient at math, physics or chemistry. Programming can also help kids understand language (i.e. grammar — I understood better many concepts after learning the basics of compilers!)
Some months ago, I published a short article on the subject, you might be interested in reading it if you understand Spanish (Programación en la escuela: Para qué?), or if you trust enough Google Translate (Programming at school: What for?)
Strange...
Last time I read this definition of liberation, it was regarding freedom fighters toppling non-US-friendly governments or some such nonsense. Apple is as liberating as handcuffs.
Programming greatly helped me go through many school subjects – Of course, including math and physics, but even to much better understand the importance of grammar.
Being able to program the procedures the teacher gave us, and play with the variables, graph the results and so on helped me understand a lot.
you haven't seen the backlog of expensive (thousands of $$$ is volume licensing), unmaintainable (no source code or documentation) and mission critical (only way to run a piece of equipment / interface with a system) applications that require a version of Windows to run.
That's why I write all my unmaintainable code on Linux!
We need better salaries in the computing sector in the UK as an incentive to get more people studying CS.
However, if you're are locked in to that extent, you are likely also locked into a specific version of Windows, say XP or NT4, just as some commercial systems are still locked into IE 6. And that is not a way for Microsoft to get new sales, those sites are as locked out of Win8 as they are Apple or Linux.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Mac does at least give you easy access to Linux, however, without much of the hardware compatibility problems (e.g. driver hell). Just get Homebrew and you're good to go. Interestingly I don't actually use any of Apple's applications; with the exception of Preview they're almost all awful. But as an OS, it's very good. Simply having a terminal puts it above Windows for me.
Computer science is not suitable to be taught at primary school level. I'm not even sure it's suitable to be taught at the middle school level.
Those Microsoft people are probably talking about something that's not Computer Science at all, like using a computer.
Computer Science does not require the use of a computer at all.
You've just listed over 51% of the market that failed to buy Windows 7 and won't upgrade to Windows 8. People using XP failed to give Microsoft money for several years. And when you consider how much of the home PC market is really just consumption, those people will also stop buying new laptops and PCs and will be okay with their Apple/Android Tablets (in the same way that people stopped needing landlines when cellphones became ubiquitous. And even people with remaining landlines in their home probably haven't upgraded their actual plugged in phone for 10 years.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Apple is as liberating as handcuffs
Hahahahaha. This isn't software libre that geeks cling onto, it's something real. For the average person, a device that too hard to use, runs out of battery life or breaks all of the time is disempowering, not empowering.
.. but when Joe Sixpack can load and use 500,000 different applications(!), he's empowered by Apple. It's Apple's walled garden, but Joe doesn't care .. Joe just wants his stuff to be useful, and I don't blame him.
.. but, it's not all bad :)
Having a functional, usable smartphone in your pocket gives you more freedom and empowerment than having a dumb telephone. That's liberation. Yes, it's loaded with Apple's software and it's manufactured by Apple
Create me an unwalled garden that accomplishes the same thing and I'll embrace it. Otherwise, quit criticising Apple for the wall, and start being appreciative of the garden. I know you won't believe me when I say it
Damn, I wish you didn't post that anonymously .. you could be the love of my life!
WTF would MS know about computers, let alone science.
Fuck them.
Yes, I agree with you. Still, having a device where the service provider reserves the right to b0rk my navigation when they realize they are not getting whatever from GoogleMaps, or when some apps I saw and wanted to use are pulled out just because they fail an arbitrary restriction... It is far from liberating.
Oh, and BTW, 500,000 applications sounds great. But when you realize that the value of at least half of them is having a fart sound on your phone when you push a "stink!" button... Well, the value is much less amazing than what it sounds like.
Finally: You will not come to *my* porch and tell me where and when can I criticize Apple or not. And now get off my lawn!
Teaching some sort of computer literacy at an early age, however crass a marketing strategy, is probably preferable to the recent push to have economics taught to primary school students in Australia. I cannot imagine a worse strategy than to indoctrinate children with the economic fallacies of endless resources and growth.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
That's exactly the stance that Digital had with VAX/VMS a couple of decades ago.
CS at the level of Knuth is Computer Science. If everybody started with Volume 1 and were slowly introduced to coding via MIX, then it would be Computer Science.
Ain''t gonna happen. Microsoft wants more Keyboarding classes, and sharp young minds who can run through a list of bullet points and agree amiably.
Is this just a Surface level attempt of Microsoftians to worm their way into a cultural position of authority?
That's a hot one... if you going to teach a valuable skill in elementary school, one that's suitable to everyday life and not a more narrow view of the world, focus on logic. Mathematics, the way it's focused in K-12, has been stripped of it's potential to fascinate and inspire students, and infromation theory, without the proper background, but certainly without self-motivation, self-selection into an applied setting, would leave most elementary school students with a logical burning question... why am I learning this arcane knowledge, and how will I ever apply it.
If Microsoft 'wants' this discipline taught to kids, let them start their own religion.
Oh, sorry.. too late. That's why they created their own language and method of describing. recreating and doing most everything that had already come before.
Create me an unwalled garden that accomplishes the same thing and I'll embrace it.
It isn't 2009 anymore, dude.
https://play.google.com/store
I wanted Adobe Flash Player on my Galaxy Tab. But the Play Store didn't have it. I went to Adobe's website, downloaded the .APK file, went into the Settings on the Galaxy Tab and temporarily enabled 'install from third parties' and installed the APK.
You're fucked if they don't have it at the Apple store and you're stuck with some iDevice.
If there is a shortage of IT workers then why are they working in sweat shops and why have so many IT graduates failed to find employment in the UK?
How is turning tens of thousands of IT graduates into primary school teachers to teach kids, most of whom are never going to go into the IT, industry, going to solve this mythical shortage?
The private sector in Europe is just about dead, and US companies are not investing, so the only source of growth for multinational corporations is the public sector. Have the government tax it citizens and hand you the proceeds.
They want kids to learn that things happen but they won't be ever able to know how or why. That if something works, is a miracle. That the seven plages included bugs, virus, worms, and even trojan horses. That when computers die they go directly to the blue heaven. If they install unauthorized software, they could venture into the dll Hell. And that they should donate to the church and pray to Bill Almighty, that lives in the sky or at least in a skycraper high enough.
Computer Science in the other hand, is about knowing how and why everything works, experimenting and being able to do changes or create new things. That is there is no magic, all is written waiting for them to discover it, or for them to create entirely new things. And there is freedom, no boundaries or limits, more than the ones that impose themselves.
Let's take 'rithmetic as an example. The vast majority of people never add up anything. Even if they're sharing the cost of a meal they will leave the bill-checking and dividing by seven to somebody else. But not having a basic confidence in 'sums' blocks access to proper maths which in turn block assess to just about all science, engineering, business, economics and every professional career.
Programming is an utter yawn-fest for kids who are not interested (about as much as most \.-ers interested in babies and lipstick) For a few it is a passion so by all means support them at school but they don't need an exam -- and even less a crusty and cringe-worthy curriculum. Then there those who ought to know a bit about it.... But what bit? Routers and SOAP protocols? Hey fellas! 'Computers store data as zeroes and ones!' Well so what? How a mobile phone encrypts is something important, how a wireless network works is important but it can't be taught by multiple choice!
There are plenty more important things to learn than being owned by technology. http://vulpeculox.net/12 for example.
Yeah, if we don't have incompetent teachers (incompetent at computers) teach kids to use Excel and Word, someone might realise that there are alternatives!
Are Native American Indians not ok? Or mixed descendants, are we not ok? Or Appalachian people? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia
All of those skills are helpful in actually being able to get yourself through university before you get to the corporate world.
But that's beside the point. I appreciate MS cynicism, but when GE says we need more engineers they're not asking public schools to teach them to make power generators or toasters. They really do want people to actually be knowledgable and capable in computing as a discipline. When you need to fill seats with foreign students by the dozens or hundreds in a CS course, and can't find seats for all the students in an english lit class you know education has failed somewhere.
Also, I don't know what world you're living in, but our CS and Software eng grads are all employed within a couple of months of graduation at decent salaries. The industry might be dynamic and require you move a lot and so on, but there are definitely jobs.
Hello fanboy. You really feel apple products liberate you? Haven't bumbed to the walls yet?
True, but like it's a waste of time to teach science before the kids have learned mathematics, it's also the optimal order in IT to teach the theory first.
First of all, maths is a good tool for science, but only a minor part of science depends on it, and only a small part of maths is directly useful for the hard sciences; the field of mathematics is many orders of magnitude larger than the few disciplines employes inphysics, statistics etc. Furthermore, science is a way of thinking and working - "The Scientific Method" - and it is perfectly possible to do without any maths at all. You observe, you make a guess at an explanation, you refine your explanation by falsifying predictions based on your explanation, this is science, and even toddlers can begin to understand it.
The same applies in IT. You make your experiences with computers without understanding much of it at first, etc etc. Learning the theory is useful, certainly, but if it was the best way, then we wouldn't have all these 10-year olds who are so bloody clever with their computers, would we? The point of letting young children experience computers is not that they whould all become super programmers, but simply that they should be familiar with technology and comfortable about using it.
This whole discussion is rather on the silly side, I feel. I think in many ways the great era of hardcore programming is behind us. There will probably always be a need for people with a good understanding of computers at all levels, but all the big fundamentals have been covered already and we are just filling in the gaps now. I don't think there is going to be a huge need in the future.
The Brittish education minister Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum "demotivating and dull" a year ago, BBC reports. "Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations, Gove said at the BETT conference for ICT in schools.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929
An extensive report on the failure of teaching boring office administration in schools, was made by Royal Society in 2011, inspiring the UK educational minister to change the whole curriculum. Basically blaming key Microsoft products for the whole mess. Then Microsoft nows tries to salvage the situation.
http://royalsociety.org/education/policy/computing-in-schools/report/
They don't want "computer science" in the kindergarten, they want "computer use". And of course, for entirely selfish reasons: getting people used to Microsoft products.
It is like the NBA donating basketballs and claiming they want "more ballistics" taught in kindergarten.
Those "100,000 unfilled IT jobs" almost certainly do not require people with a Computer Science degree; they mostly likely require people with more general IT skills. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of them are for third line support roles, which pay peanuts - probably not even enough to start paying off the student loans for the expensive degree they're almost certainly asking for as a qualification requirement.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
MS is in a large part responsible for the laughable way in which "computing" is taught in schools...
Not only have they pushed very hard for schools to simply teach how to use MS products rather than about computing in general, but they are also directly responsible for scaring millions of people off from learning about how their machines work...
When you bought early home computers like a C64 you were actually encouraged to learn about it, and if you crashed it the absolute worst case was hitting reset because the core system was held in ROM and couldn't be damaged by the user.
MS on the other hand have always pushed an extremely fragile system which is very easy to damage, and then covered it with all manner of scary warnings "this directory contains system files, don't look here!" etc.
The first perceptions at a young age have a significant affect on later life... If your first exposure to computing is a system you are free to experiment with, knowing nothing bad will happen to you then a childs natural curiosity will drive them to learn about it. On the other hand if you are faced by a fragile system covered in scary warnings, and even worse someone (eg parents, teachers) who will become angry if you break it then you become afraid and won't experiment, won't learn or think for yourself and will very rigidly follow instructions for fear of what might happen if you don't.
If you want to teach kids about computing, give them systems they can't break (or at the very least a trivial way to restore them to how they were) and let them explore. Teachers should be there to guide them and point things out, but not to dictate a specific path the kids must take.
Something that would work well is games which include sourcecode (eg the old BASIC games on C64 and similar), let them play for a while and then show them how the change the rules...
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There are a shortage of competent workers, not a shortage of workers in general.
Graduates are not necessarily competent, and almost always lack experience. The biggest problem is that many people simply follow what they've been told, and don't think for themselves.
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"Computer Science" in the UK means using MS Word and MS PowerPoint. MS Excel is already considered to be too difficult...
The walled garden only applies to iOS... OSX although it now provides the convenience of an app store (just as most linux distros provide a repository), you are not forced to use it. OSX is still far more open than windows in many many ways.
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So you get your application software from a program provided by the OS vendor which automatically downloads, installs and updates it?
Wasn't so long ago that people were claiming this distribution model was scary for users, and that users would demand to drive to a physical store and buy software in a box containing physical media...
Linux distros were always way ahead in this respect, but they failed to promote the benefits to users... Just look at all the lowsy distributions that came preinstalled on netbooks.
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If you're talking pre-OSX mac, then you have to compare it to what else was around at the time...
Windows 3.x and 9x were also extremely well known for being slow and crashing constantly, AmigaOS was massively faster but still very prone to crashing.
If you wanted a decent reliable system you had to fork out for a highend unix box, which would be reliable and fast but too expensive for most people.
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Microsoft, being a company run for-profit, should realise that if the industry upped compensation a bit, the lack of candidates and interest in the general subject-area should sort itself out fairly quickly. Amazing things them markets.
For years, Microsoft has been more than happy sitting back and raking in the cash from Windows and Office licenses because the only IT skills kids learnt in our UK schools was how to use Office, Word and Powerpoint.
Now initiatives like the Raspberry Pi have started to show that kids can learn programming quickly and cheaply on Open Source and open standards-based programming tools, all of a sudden Microsoft takes an interest.
One can only assume it's to get the kids hooked into Visual Studio licensing before they turn into Open Source Communists...
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
If by "computer science" MS means problem solving, algorithm development, information theory, how the different bits of hardware work etc, my response has to be: "With all possible respect, you are meddling in a specialised area in which you do not have adequate credentials. You have expressed a layman's opinion which is, unfortunately, of limited pedagogical* value in a primary school."
If by "computer science" MS means getting children to start using MS products at an ever earlier age my response has to be: "With all possible respect, go fuck yourself. Really, go away and fuck yourself. Sell your crap to adults all you like but leave the children alone; because of your past behaviour you have enough enemies now, you really don't need any more." And now I'm really pissed off at being reduced to using a "think of the children" argument.
*I use that word a lot (because IAAT) and it really does mean what I think it means.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
1981 - Year 7 - binary and hexidecimal number systems, very simple boolean logic and logo programming. Of course most was done on paper but all students had a chance to run a logo program on the computer some time during the semester. A few years later I was doing something not really any more complicated than those primary school logo programs with G-codes on a milling machine.
...the UK fall behind at everything.
It wouldn't surprise me if they still think the Sun revolves around the Earth.
You're right. Only work that matters needs to be
Look everyone an elitist wanker on /.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Real computer scientists use *nix :D
I hope that's in your curriculum, microsoft !
On a more realistic note, this will lead to a generation of kids not knowing anything about computing.
"...the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery" - Djikstra.
So these kids will start out with ipads, later get a BASIC education, and in-between they'll get 'educated' in something even more damaging than basic.
Good luck to the first teacher who tries to show them programming in something that doesn't present a form editor on startup.