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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.
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
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...
No doubt you haven't read the article, and wouldn't let something like that get in the way of a good rant anyway.
But the plans also include improvements to mathematics and science (I can't comment on reading/writing).
FTA: Mathematics: five-year-olds to be taught fractions for the first time, for a solid grounding at an early age in preparation for algebra and more complex arithmetic. The new curriculum states that nine-year-olds must be taught times tables to 12, with more emphasis on the skills of mathematical modelling and problem-solving.
Science: evolution will be taught to primary school pupils for the first time, with the new curriculum having a greater focus on scientific knowledge, practical work and mathematical requirements. In secondary school, pupils will study biology, chemistry and physics in greater depth, with greater emphasis on mathematical modelling and problem-solving.
Without speculating about the political motivation for it, this looks like an improvement to me.
Who should tinker with toys if not children? Or just because something is fun it can't be educational? The best use of 3D printers is education: they teach the basics of design and programming, and are very good at printing short-lived plastic toys.
And you know this how
Yeah, we should never expose children to the wider realities of technology. We should hold their noses to the desk, and ensure they never see anything but the insides of books until they can parrot back exactly what they are shown. Just remember that we also need to ensure that we must present math and science in as boring a manner as possible to suck the life and interest out of every student who encounters it.
Therefore no one should ever be allowed to build a model rocket, or be taught physics, in school.
Or we should give students every possible avenue and let them experience and experiment with whatever we can and let them determine their skills.
There isn't, but limiting education such that those are the pinnacle people can hope for is as idiotic as any stupid thing being done in education today.
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
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.
"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/
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.