British Schoolchildren To Get Programming Lessons 273
judgecorp writes "The British Education Secretary Michael Gove has said that the school ICT curriculum will be scrapped and replaced with programming and real computer science. Britain's schoolchildren have had compulsory ICT (information and communications technology) lessons for some time, but they are hated by staff and pupils alike, amounting to little more than Power Point training, using the products rather than understanding the code. There is room for improvement — and the British-designed Raspberry Pi could be part of this, but can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?"
Nice idea but... (Score:1, Interesting)
If I thought this would actually happen as described, it would almost be enough to make me consider a career in teaching. Good job I know better.
Wrong sponsors (Score:5, Interesting)
can the new system break away from the old product-centric regime when it will apparently be sponsored by companies including Google and Microsoft?
Sponsors are fine. The correct sponsors for a programming curriculum are my personal favorites microchip.com and xilinx.com, not The Mighty GOOG and MS. Give the kids a Spartan-3 FPGA starter kit, a PIC32MX1 starter kit, and a whole lot of tabs of acid, or at least 2 of the 3, and they'll do just fine.
Note that a "real CS curriculum" is a lot of discrete math and database theory (Codd normal forms, etc) so about 50% to 75% of a real CS curriculum just needs a whiteboard, no hardware, and optionally a box set of Knuth. This confuses the hell of out people who can't tell the difference between IT and CS, just like its easy to confuse the hell out of people who can't tell the difference between education and training.
Re:It shouldn't be mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It shouldn't be mandatory (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not about forcing kids to become programmers, it's about exposing them to and teaching them actual things about computers rather than just how to use Office. In the same way that you don't try and teach advanced quantum theory at highschool level, but you do introduce the basic concepts and how they apply to physics in a general sense.
I mercifully missed out on ICT being taught at GCSE because it wasn't brought in until after I left school, but having seen my brother's sample exam paper I don't know why they even bothered. It makes the ECDL look complex; questions like "Here is a picture of a keyboard, is this an input device or an output device" and coursework involving the design of databases on paper printouts of Excel sheets.
People increasingly seem to be of the opinion that "kids these days" know all about computers because they use them all the time, but it's bollocks. They know about Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and how to stream porn; they don't know any more about computers than most 40-somethines, they're just more comfortable using them. If they can genuinely reform the IT teaching in the UK (which is highly doubtful, but you never know) so that kids are taught hardware, software and programming fundamentals then it would be nothing but beneficial.
Re:It shouldn't be mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nice idea but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to an (otherwise excellent) private school in the UK, in the early/mid 1990s. What was striking at the time was how much worse the quality of the IT teaching was compared to that in other subjects. For most of my time there, IT (which was only mandatory from ages 11-13) was taught by an elderly priest with no computing knowledge, following a script sent out by some course provider.
While I'm sure we were well below the level of many slashdotters, my friends and I were significantly more computer literate than him. We'd been messing around with DOS, clearing up EMS and conventional memory to get our games to run for years (a couple of years later, we'd be enthusiastically pulling together Doom .wads and Duke Nukem 3d mods). Despite being among the "good kids" in the school in behavioural terms 99% of the time, we ended up so bored in those lessons (while he tried to teach basic word processing) that we ended up causing all kinds of havoc on the school PCs (completely undetected) and disrupting lessons no end (all while looking innocent and helpful).
When I went into the sixth form (16-18, for the benefit of non-UK readers), they got somebody in "from industry" to teach IT - and made a once-weekly half-hour IT class mandatory for everybody. Of course, the guy they'd got in "from industry" turned out to have been a factory floor manager in a PC assembly plant. He knew no more about the subject he was supposed to be teaching than the priest. The lessons came down to him reading instructions from a printed script (again provided by some faceless course-provision company) on how to create Word and Powerpoint documents. By this point my friends and I had brushed up our skills no end and were capable of causing even more creative havoc (again, always undetected).
Things may have improved since then, but there was a long way to go from a position where a school that would have been comfortably among the top 10% in the UK didn't even know the skills it needed in an IT teacher, let alone how to design a curriculum.
Re:It shouldn't be mandatory (Score:4, Interesting)
While I appreciate the need to expose students to computer classes in the same way they're exposed to other subjects, I don't think that something as specific as programming should be a *mandatory* requirement. Programming is a vocation, like many vocations, that some people are cut out for and other people are not. Those with a true passion for it will actively seek it out and those with no interest in it will hate it no matter how many programming classes you force them take. You can't MAKE a great programmer any more than you can MAKE a great engineer, mechanic, etc. Someone has to WANT it first.
I taught my two sons to program. Only one of them liked it, but they both got an astonishing side benefit from it: it taught them to see their own brains as software... with algorithms and bugs. In the context of a broader parent-child discussion of recognizing and dealing with personality bugs, programming seems to make it real, in a way that no amount of lecture can.
Haven't you noticed how few people are introspective, how few are even capable of thinking that their thoughts and feelings may be incorrect?
Where will the teachers come from? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nice idea, but are you going to find X thousand teachers capable of teaching programming by September? or be able to *properly* train the current ones?
I assume if they are working up the new curriculum now, it will be ready in a couple of months (if you're lucky), which gives you about 3 months to distribute the curriculum to schools before they all go off on their summer holidays. 12 weeks then to get the teachers up to speed on the new courses.
I am not saying it's impossible - teachers are amazing, and incredibly dedicated. But declaring you're going to teach something which isn't currently being taught has a lead in time to get the schools up to speed. Or expect the teachers to work their evenings and weekends on an extra unpaid task (which will mean you will get highly variable results).
Unless of course you throw a major company like Microsoft or Google a blank cheque, tell em to take as much money as they want and give you a bunch of passwords to some website (probably based on a foreign country's curriculum, e.g. USA, which might not align with the UK curricula) and get your students to drag themselves through some automated lessons.
I think its political rhetoric. It can be done, and it would be cool to give some students programming skills, but I think it will take more than a few months to change the education system for a whole country and retrain the teachers.
I'm an ICT teacher.... (Score:4, Interesting)
For so long ICT has been MS based. There are some exceptions - scratch is a simple programming language that is used in a small way for example. I doubt the capability of ICT teachers with programming and CS. I mean, I do electronics and programming as a hobby but do I have the extensive knowledge to teach it right? Unsure, but I bet I could punch through it. Other ICT teachers I'm not so sure about. I'm a fairly stereotypical geek with some social ability.
If you're a decent coder and EE, why would you go into teaching? From the sciences (like me) I can understand - very low pay, low reward to work ratio. You'd do it for the love of it. If you're a decent coder you should be coding I'd say. I don't think we have the body of people to teach it in this country.
But I hope it does change and I get to have a crack at it!
Re:It shouldn't be mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
Same in the UK, they don't start until secondary school (equivalent of high school i guess), and are pretty basic (Teaching you how to order a cup of coffee in french or german)... And you will almost never encounter the language you learn anywhere but school.
In other countries where the primary language is not english, then english is generally taught in schools at quite an early age and is likely to be encountered regularly through the internet and on television...
People from Holland tend to speak very good english because most of the shows on tv are in english with dutch subtitles, teaching them both the meaning and (usually american) pronunciation of the words in an environment that's actually interesting for them...
A classroom is a terrible place to learn anything, you have a dull rigid environment which causes you to mentally switch off, combined with other kids who are there by force not choice and who can easily disrupt anyone who is actually trying to learn.
hypercard (Score:2, Interesting)