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Lack of Teacher Training Hampers UK Programming Education
An anonymous reader writes: The UK government recently introduced a new computer curriculum to the school system in order to get more kids into programming. Unfortunately, they're running into a serious problem: one-third of the secondary schools tasked with teaching these programs have not spent any money training their teachers on the requisite knowledge and technology. The government has provided £4.5 million for this training, and a number of schools have spent their share and more. But it's clearly not filtering down to every school, and that harms the children enrolled in these schools.
Agree. I volunteer 'teach' https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ in the UK. The main article is true, not the teacher's fault, the government moved the focus from ICT [learning Word, learning Excel] to computing very quickly. This is a great idea because we're back to 'creation' as in the days of BASIC games rather than consumption.
But it's a human enterprise and YMMV, the teachers and the pupils will vary in ability and motivation. I live in one of the poorer parts of London and any kids that 'want' this may have a good future. They can't all be football or hip-hop stars. Secondly there's an initiative called Computing at School http://www.computingatschool.o... that promotes computational thinking. Even if you don't program, some of the problem solving techniques are universally applicable.
So one can find a lot to moan about, but there's a lot of promise/fun in this. I wrote my first program in about 1966 [FORTRAN on a mainframe] and I still enjoy it, in the UK that makes me [what they call] a 'sad' person.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
I'm 12 years old and am an avid programmer. Not ever have I had a teacher that taught me something I didn't know. And we're probably forgetting here that half the teachers at least will be highly inept. Also, you should note that the curriculum doesn't advance past Scratch ( a drag and drop sprite based language) which only teaches the basic concepts. In IT classes nobody even vaugly understands programming and walks out of that room with no further knowledge. My point is that the teacher won't be able to teach it and the students won't be able to understand it.