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English Schools To Introduce Children To 3D Printers, Laser Cutters, Robotics
First time accepted submitter Kingston writes "In a radical change to the English National Curriculum, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary has announced ambitious changes to the technology syllabus. Children will be introduced to programming and debugging from the age of 5. Secondary schools (age 11 and up) will be required to have a 3D printer and introduce children to laser cutters and robotics in the design and technology course. The much derided ICT (Information and Communications Technology) subject will be overhauled to teach 'several' programming languages to children so that they can 'design, use and evaluate computational abstractions that model the state and behavior of real-world problems and physical systems.'"
Does the daily mail know that you can use 3d printers and laser cutters to manufacture hoodies and knives? Monstrous!
I was at a 'technology literate' middle school when Lego Mindstorms came out, and the school bought a few of them for the school computer club so people could 'program' and 'debug' the RCX robots. It was good fun, but all it taught to kids was a very rudimentary concept of program flow.
If you want to make kids tech literate, you deconstruct something they use in their every day lives, when they're old enough to be capable of it. A good example would be a high school course focusing on high level full-stack design - here's twitter, here's how their servers look like in a very simple way, here's their API, let's do a 2 month project to make a frontend. Or let's make our own mini twitter just for our class, here's a sql server and we can write the backend together over a month or so. That sort of thing would both engage kids and give them useful experience.
oh yeah.
Now we can introduce even more people to tinker toys that they'll never use after they get out of school!
How about concentrating on reading comprehension, mathematics, and basic sciences, or if one does go into "trades", go into real trades that have proven to be durable careers...
Not everyone gets to be a rocket scientist when they grow up, and we need to tailor our education systems to present high-but-attainable options. There's no dishonor in being a certified journeyman welder or an electrician or even a plumber, and all can pay very well if the individual learns the skills needed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You can make a lot of things with your hands without a 3D printer, including guns. You can make a gun out of readily available wood using only cutting tools, and you can even craft the bullets for them with simple tools. I think people are a bit hysterical about 3D printing, it can used for far more than printing weapons. Colonial times called, they want their basic invention back. You could argue that someone could make a plastic knife at school and shank someone with it. But, prisoners have proven you can make a shank out of toilet paper with your bare hands, water and some time. You can't ban intent by banning a piece of equipment, malevolent people will find a way. In the meantime, the technology can be used to bring a lot of ingenuity into the world. Imagine a youngster creating developing an arduino platform and a case to go around it using a 3d printer to create a handheld device to analyze bacteria in the air for example. Science projects in the future are going to get a lot more interesting. You can create very dangerous things in the chemistry lab, should we ban chemistry as well? I just think the mere notion is silly.
...will be printing 3D sharks, gluing the firkkin' lasers onto their heads and fitting them with little robotic legs.
Regards, Phil
It won't work. It's too early. My impression is that most programmers don't start programming until their teens. I've tried to teach my kids algebra, and before 6th grade their brains are teflon, it just won't stick, but after that they get it. Ya gotta introduce things at the appropriate times.
It would take a long time, and probably be wildly unethical; but I'd be fascinated to know whether selective breeding could optimize humans for acquiring useless-in-the-wild abstract skills at yet earlier ages, or whether the old neural net can only grow so fast, barring fundamental improvements in cell biology...
After, say, a dozen generations of breeding the fastest algebra-learners with one another, would you see further improvements? Nothing? Epic autism? How about 100 generations?
My nascent eugenics program wants to know!
Here's an idea, how about teaching about contracts, real estate and financial planning as well?
We've already seen, in both the US and the UK, where having people skilled in contracts and finance dicking around with real estate can lead us. Let's not try that again, please...
The real concern is that they figure out they can make LEGO think of the lawsuits the school will face
Now we can introduce even more people to tinker toys that they'll never use after they get out of school!
You mean critical thinking and the ability to work with computers?
I would say I've used both skills quite a lot in the real world.
I would say most everyone in whatever field would need those skills.
Even McDonalds workers are better served understanding how to think and use computers...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From the article : "Pupils aged five to seven will be expected to "understand what algorithms are" and to "create and debug simple programs".
Kids start school at age 5 here in the UK. From my memories of that age 37 or so years ago, there was much playing with sand, learning to read and write and really simple maths (learning to recite multiplication tables, simple addition and subtraction, etc). I learnt to program when I was 12 on the first generation of home computers, but then I was familiar with the basics of algebra so it all seemed fairly natural. But demanding that kids are learning about algorithms and creating and debugging programs before they can read and write to a basic level of competence is unbelievably dumb.
BTW, the education minister responsible for this is an ideologically driven conservative, who has also been recently proposing that state funded schools should be preferably controlled by the churches rather than the (democratically elected) local authorities, as well as the possibility that they could also be run on a for-profit basis. Not impressed by this at all, especially seeing the online comments in some of the more right wing news sites in response to this news story claiming that "making and building things is real engineering not just writing a few lines of computer code".
I started off fine in maths, but stuggled towards the end of higher education.
Main reason is the gift of decent intelligence, eventually swamped by crippling laziness, but I digress.
Contributory factor was also that I was, and still am, piss-poor at visualizing concepts easily. Should my maths (or my physics) have had a practical outlet, then maybe they'd have stuck with me better. An example would be when I got to use one of those programmable turtle thingies. Yay, we can draw a line, then a box, then a square and well obviously it's time to draw a circle... and well that's how you learn about pi.
I think a lot of the motivation for these changes comes from the criticism of the existing ICT course from Ofsted the education regulator but probably more from the speech Eric Schmidt made about the UK throwing away it's engineering legacy. He said "I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools"
Good goals. But who the hell is going to teach all this?
This is already a major problem in math: the set of people who want to teach a bunch of 5-6 year olds is pretty much disjoint from the set of people who like math. I don't want to bash teachers, but if teachers absolutely hate a subject (and trust me, a VERY large percentage of elementary educators hate math - I've taught a lot of them in college), there are going to be major problems.
I can't imagine that these educators are going to be much better with teaching programming. I mean, what percentage of kindergarten teachers know how to program? Hell, I wouldn't trust most of the K-4 teachers I know to teach basic computer usage. These are smart and good people, but computers and math just aren't their forte.
Maybe they will have specialists teaching this. That's nice. But the set of people who specialize in programming typically do not do very well teaching 5 year olds. Competent C coders just don't think like a 5 year old most of the time (snark aside).
I'm sure that you could do some training, but that would take a long time. And it would require some research into the best way for teaching very young people about programming. Some politicians are just making all these very nice goals, but the groundwork just hasn't been done to make them practical.
I'm sure that some people will say "meh, you are going to be teaching Hello World, how much training do you need"? Let me say that it matters. There have been a substantial number of studies which show that young kids will very quickly pick up on how their teacher feels about a subject. For example, many young girls pick up signals that math is hard, icky, and not fun from their educators (girls pick up signals from women better than boys do, and most K-3 educators are female, so this is a bigger problem for girls than boys).
This is a major reason why many girls fall behind so early in math. They get convinced at a very young age that math is stupid, hard, and only for boys. The same thing could very easily be introduced to programming as well.
Yeah. I was enrolled in advanced placement classes until I was 10 (6th grade in the USA) and I was removed from them because I simply could not learn algebra no matter how hard my parents and teachers tried to jam it down my throat. A year later in Canada I was introduced to algebra again and went on to get more or less effort-free A's in mathematics courses, and although I had some initial trouble in engineering school due to never really learning how to apply myself and learn something hard, I did just fine throughout my mechanical engineering degree right up until the final math course of the degree, where I barely got through with a C- despite a solid effort on my part.
As a computer and software engineer, I've taught myself mechanical engineering and manufacturing techniques with a lot of help from a laser-cut & press-brake shop owner. The biggest thing people need to learn is that you can design anything you want in the computer but you can't build it. Limitations of the tooling are a big problem. Add to that the fact that CAD assumes that metal is totally flat over any distance and you're going to run into problems. Another lesson is nomenclature. What do you call certain fiddly bits? You know what one looks like but figuring out what to call it so you can find it in a catalog is a challenge.
IMHO, engineering curricula needs to deemphasize theory and put more focus on the real world.
Overheard during recess: "No Mister Bond. I expect you to die."
Have gnu, will travel.
A few months ago, I had a ten year old boy phone me up, to ask me to coach him in Java programming - his choice of language.
His parents are pleased with his progress, and so am I.
My own youngest some did a little bit of HTML, Java, & SQL at a younger age. He is now 15, and has since moved on to other things.
Both youngsters are in top classes and doing well at school.
People often grossly underestimate what young children can achieve.
"You can create very dangerous things in the chemistry lab, should we ban chemistry as well?"
They are already working on that. A 3D printer is more akin to a home chemistry kit. This is what a chemistry kit from the 40's looked like:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/1940s_Gilbert_chemistry_set_04.jpg
And this is an intro kit from today:
http://www.hometrainingtools.com/classic-chemistry-kit/p/KT-CLACHEM/
Notice anything missing?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
until one of them accidentally prints a toy gun. Oh, it's in the English schools you say? Not the ones in America? Carry on then.
The comprehensive changes sound generally good, abstract though they are. Since we're dealing with abstractions, I'll keep it abstract:
If English schooling is anything like American (apologies, I haven't got much of a clue--I'm coming at this as I hear it as a "yank"), it will take time to implement these changes, and by the same token, it's comparatively easy to write a wishlist of changes that "sound good." The pessimist within murmurs that this seldom translates to real systemic improvement, which demands close attention to detail, a willingness to piss off certain obstructionists to realize a certain goal, thoroughly invested critical thinkers at the helm, and long-term planning. When I hear Brits describe their government, those are seldom the things suggested (seems to be a pretty universal phenomenon), but we'll see. This could turn out well for them. I'm not going to start on American schooling.
To the points about all the new comp/info sci, and the programming in particular, there are several problems with this that I notice:
First of all, teaching elementary or secondary school-aged kids multiple programming languages is a terrifying proposition. Firstly because it won't really work for most (if any) of them, for the same reason the "New Math" programs in the US failed (most children learn concretely most of the time; those few who can reason abstractly won't see the value in it until they have a grounding in the intuitive, concrete principles, which New Math glosses over) and for other reasons as well, like the fact that much of any abstraction will utterly fail to impress the other 80% of the kids in that age range. Secondly because programming languages are idiosyncratic and all demand practice, for which there's no substitute. It's far better to practice and gain experience with a single language than it is to swim in several (for the experience of saying "Oh! The language wants me to do it this way." rather than the expectation of growing up to become an [insert language] guru). Are we to assume English schools are going to create "immersive" programming environments in which children learn to bootstrap every facet of applications they themselves build to do the rest of their schoolwork? Thirdly because programming languages change so quickly that all but the general ideas and practice of building logical systems will be obsolete by the time they're adults. Fourthly because I seriously doubt the UK really has the resources in terms of trained and practiced teacher-programmers to do this right. All of these taken together mean that if this proposal is realized, it will waste a lot of time, money, and resource.
My personal advice to the British government and education system (because they have no doubt been sitting on the edges of their seats in anticipation of my pronouncement) is to bootstrap computing education with little exercises accomplishing little but hopefully meaningful tasks like turning a lightbulb on or off using a very simple programming environment and a very straightforward language. Make no mistake: this is a feet wettening exercise and little more. Anyone who shows extra interest can be given supplementary material. Then you slowly show how programming is the same thing as algebra, according to the same principles--slowly enough that just about everyone gets it. You ramp up the involvement of math in solving problems in science and computing. Use tons of visual aids: graphs of functions and networks and et cetra. Before they're through middle school, they must take a basic logic/critical thinking/statistics/epistemology course to establish correlation doesn't equal causation and how argument works. By the time they're in high school, the school should be organizing internships in computing-related fields and sending especially bright students to take classes at colleges and universities (full disclosure: this is what I did for a lot of my high school and it's one of the best things that happened to me). At every stage, for all the rea
Every school computer should be running Linux. Not only would this save millions, but you can instantly pop up a shell and start programming in any language you want for free (C, Java, Python, etc). Kids can pick up a Pi to continue their hobby from home, without parents needlessly shelling out for expensive PCs or laptops. No need for expensive IDEs either.
The way you can so easily create custom Ubuntu distros, it's mind-blowing there isn't a UK tailored version of Edubuntu (different versions for different age groups) for schools.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Although it sounds ambitious I have doubts...... Mainly due to the shift in responsibility. 20-30 years ago you got bad grades? Your own fault. Today you get bad grades? Teachers fault. Hence a shift towards teaching to the exam....... Secondly go further to FE colleges (16+) and the situation gets worse. If you have a read of the Wolf Report (2011) she came up with damning conclusions about the education system especially FE. That courses were run not to benefit the learners, but purely to game the government funding system since the funding formulae changed once the children got above 14 and were based on results.
"The real concern is that they figure out they can make LEGO think of the lawsuits the school will face"
The protection for the normal LEGO bricks ended years ago, anybody can make them nowadays.
"On September 14, 2010, the European Court of Justice ruled that the 8-peg design of the original Lego brick "merely performs a technical function [and] cannot be registered as a trademark." [3]"
WP
I've taught 9-11 year-olds programming and about 80% of the class is capable of learning enough to solve simple problems given to them. Frankly, the 20% are unable to concentrate on anything other than video games or TV - they're the ones that would be staring into space or playing football every waking hour 20-30 years ago.
20-30% can excel and really grasp some or all of the basic concepts in such a way that they can solve significant novel problems and even set those problems for themselves.
I just don't get how it's actually supposed to do it.
One of the independent coding initiatives (in fact, most of them) in the UK had a bunch donated to them by Google. My club of 15 kids got three and I'm supposed to give them out to the kids. I'm almost 100% certain they will sit in a cupboard and never get used - I mean, what's the point? 99% of families have a laptop - that includes a keyboard and a screen, without that - for most people - a computer is useless.
I was thinking of this on my way in. I went to a pretty good high school in Upstate NY. One thing that was never taught nor forced upon us was public speaking. I think that only once in 10th grade, I had to give an oral presentation. I remember that in 11th grade, a noticeable number of the kids could not read two paragraphs out loud. Now, I should say that our HS did a great job of teaching chemistry, physics, math and programming, being located on the outskirts of GE-Schenectady. I remember that I had a hard time during my first few years after college in presenting and discussing my ideas for my job. I had to learn presentation skills by working nights selling sport shoes until I could carry-on a business type conversation without freezing up.
You can make a lot of things with your hands without a 3D printer, including guns. You can make a gun out of readily available wood using only cutting tools, and you can even craft the bullets for them with simple tools. I think people are a bit hysterical about 3D printing, it can used for far more than printing weapons. Colonial times called, they want their basic invention back. You could argue that someone could make a plastic knife at school and shank someone with it. But, prisoners have proven you can make a shank out of toilet paper with your bare hands, water and some time. You can't ban intent by banning a piece of equipment, malevolent people will find a way. In the meantime, the technology can be used to bring a lot of ingenuity into the world. Imagine a youngster creating developing an arduino platform and a case to go around it using a 3d printer to create a handheld device to analyze bacteria in the air for example. Science projects in the future are going to get a lot more interesting. You can create very dangerous things in the chemistry lab, should we ban chemistry as well? I just think the mere notion is silly.
It is a "new" thing. People who are steadfast rooted in the past and unwilling to embrace the present are going to have knee-jerk reactions with the latest thing.
Basically: If it doesn't make sense, then only bad things will come out of it regardless of any benefits that could come.