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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.
Most people cannot learn the required skills to any reasonable degree. At best this initiative will increase the number of really bad programmers. There are far too many of those already.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Teaching algebra has no place in schools
Most people cannot learn the required skills to any reasonable degree. At best this initiative will increase the number of really bad mathematicians. There are far too many of those already."
See how stupid it sounds? How about nutrition/cooks? How about rugby/sportsman? It's fucking idiotic to suggest.
You teach above the level of the kids, you expose to the wonderful things in your subject, you inspire some to take it up, other to plan their career around it, they go to uni and learn how to do it properly (and churn through the boring shit that they aren't interested in because they've been inspired by you and can see the end result).
And programming is at the CORE of computer science. It's the theory of computer science, laid bare. It doesn't have to be advanced, but it has to BE, in the same that you can't just skip algebra - sure, most kids will never use it but kids minds are plastic for a reason. Stretch them with something they don't quite understand when they are young, and it becomes SO MUCH more pliant that they are able to learn so much more, and quicker, and learn things they have no particular interest in to get to their goal.
In the 70's and beyond you WERE taught BASIC. It was designed for just that purpose. And with that same skill you can still write phone apps and all sorts nowadays. Without it, you can't. You're fucked. Unless you want to change the graphics in a template and nothing else.
If you don't teach everything, the kids won't know what they can do, they won't realise what they are good at, they won't learn to do things to get where they want and they won't have the skills even if they are top-end when they get there (e.g. you can't be a mathematician without learning algebra and I assure you it's easier to learn it when you're a kid).
Nobody is saying that every kid will churn our a million lines of C. That's fucking insanity. We're saying programming is a core skill of computer science that MY generation were taught from the ages of 8/9 and is still relevant. As such, it NEEDS to be taught. Or you're not teaching computer science.
The essence of the problem is exactly that, however. We're not teaching computer science. We're teaching "computing". How to use a computer. Not design it, build it, diagnose it, etc. We're teaching how to drive, not how to engineer a car or how it works. That's a backwards step. And as computers get more powerful, it's more and more akin to teaching how to drive an automatic with lane-veering warnings and reverse-parking sensors. It's getting dumber and dumber and dumber and all the teachers only ever drove automatics themselves, by now.
Being "good with" using computers is mistaken for being a computer expert. This is a dangerous, stupid, mistake to make. It's like saying that any HGV driver is a good expert witness for explaining to a court why the brakes failed on a jumbo jet in a major accident.