A 'Radical Manifesto' For Computer Teaching In English Schools 108
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by
timothy
from the it-clicks-the-mouse-or-else-it-gets-the-hose-again dept.
from the it-clicks-the-mouse-or-else-it-gets-the-hose-again dept.
00_NOP writes "Everybody (or almost everybody) in England agrees that computing teaching to kids in high school is broken. In response the government promised a radical overhaul and a new curriculum. But then last week it was discovered the government had scrapped the bit of the education department that would develop any such curriculum. Not to be deterred, John Naughton, the Cambridge University academic who wrote the Short History of the Future, has now published his own 'radical' manifesto on how computing should be taught."
Re:Why stop there? (Score:4, Interesting)
A "basic understanding" of computers, i.e. an understanding which takes them beyond thinking in terms of a black box and instead in terms of mathematical and physical concepts, requires a couple of afternoons of attention from a smart, well-prepared schoolkid.
I think you're greatly underestimating how long it will take to teach/grasp everything from the basic understanding "ok, so it's these 'logic gate' thingies that use electricity..." to the basic understanding of concepts such as databases (no matter how you try to compare them to excel), network topology, encryption (not that they needed to learn the algorithms but the basic understanding of concepts such as public keys would be pretty great), etc. etc. takes if the student has never herd of them before.
Of course, we might just greatly disagree about how much everyone in modern world should understand about computers.
Re:Who here didn't teach themselves how to compute (Score:5, Interesting)
I taught myself because my education failed me, then I went to university and studied them. If I hadn't had a friend who was interested in them and who exposed me to the idea they did more than play games, I probably wouldn't have even known that computer programming was a thing that you could do.
Your own inquisitiveness is good, but you need to at least expose people to the basic concepts to trigger it.