Fantastic!
Grinned the whole way through that.
'In his speech [...] the Education Secretary Michael Gove appeared to accept in its entirety the argument that ICT had become little more than training in office skills and something far more rigorous was required [...] While Alex Hope's slogan "coding is the new Latin" did not appeal to some, it must have appealed to the …
Some of the Molesworthian spelling mistakes are ah...wrong. 6/10 Stob see me during the brake. You need to swot more.
As an aside, The Compleet Molesworth was on Waterstone's 'Books You Always Meant To Read' display just a couple of weeks ago. There are worse ways to spend a tenner.
Cave! Cave! Here comes Sigismund!
At uni/poly we had a Harris S6 mini - in a tall rack case in the middle of the machine room.
Yup Engineering got DEC's - compsci got antique (even then) Vulcan's :-)
Anyhoo this POC^Wmachine was proudly being shown off during open day to the goggle eyed prospectives for next years course. I was working on a terminal just outside next to the sole plotter and a friend was on call as sysadmin and lecturer helldesker.
Anyway one of the brighter students noted a plastic bucket stored in the bottom of the Harris cabinet and asked why it was there. Lecturer was in obvious panic so he turned to my mate Tony Smith (not of Reg fame!). rather than explain there was a hole in the roof that the uni was too skint/lazy to repair he explained how computers operate on bits. Everybody nodded. He then asked if everyone had seen a "pachinko" machine (again everyone nodded including lecturer). He explained that computers are like very very complex pachinko machines and eventually the bits fall out of the bottom of the machine into said bucket. Part of his duties is to empty the full bucket back into the top of the machine. Again everyone (including lecturer nodded).
I had a really hard time not breaking out into hysterical laughter.
2005.
While I was looking that up, I found a bit I hadn't read before:
"... neither the author(s) nor Apress shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this work."
In the 80's it was perhaps relevant to teach classes about 'computers' in the same way that people where knew about 'cars' in the 1900's: designing, building, maintaining and driving being all much the same thing back then. It wasn't many years later that thermodynamics, automotive design, production line management, garage mechanics and driving skills became different subjects.
By all means teach the equivalent of driving skills at school; I think of perhaps typing and the theory/practice of email/spreadsheets/databases and cyber security. But, to my mind anything much beyond that is a specialist subject these days. The territory of after school clubs and college courses.
Computer Science at what was O'level, should still be an option for those that want it.
It's what got me to go on to study it at degree level, and the same skills/youth are needed in this country.
I find it sad that it has been replaced with ICT, which has essentially become secretarial skillz.
There should be the two streams: Computer Science/IT and Technology End User. Each serve their purpose.
Just as there are still Chemistry, Pure Maths and Physics as options, there must be Computer Science/IT too. To say otherwise is to say we want no future in scientific/technology progress.
No, it's not.
Entry into programming is as easy as ever in this modern world of the 'App' on iOS and Android. At the very least an intro to programming course is needed to teach kids that programming is possible, and not some magic done by high wizards.
Computers play a huge, huge part in everyone's lives these days. It's irresponsible not to give them a foot in the doorway to the huge world of manipulating and programming them. We don't teach kids just to read, we teach them to write as well. Intro to programming is the equivalent.
Ability to program != ability to write maintainable code.
Ability to copy'n'paste != ability to understand what you are copying does.
Ability to drag'n'drop != ability to understand the visual idiom and where it breaks down.
Case in point: Design a simple web-page layout in MS Word with the words 'Hello World' centred in bold type. Save as HTML. Open in notepad. Point to the 3% of the cruft that actually makes the words 'Hello World' appear on the page in the right place. Explain what the other 97% does.
There may be a place for a "computer skills" course which is about learning to use applications or one a bit more management oriented covering stuff like systems analysis, writing system specs etc.
Then "The IT course" could be the kind of mentally stimulating exercise many of an older generation of IT workers got from their ZX80, BBC micro, Archimedes etc. Every student gets a Raspberry Pi as base hardware they can expand on hardware and get into coding. Frankly I think our schools system couldn't cope, it would be better done as an Open University type scheme but maybe a bit of a hybrid so in school there is a facilitator, who also participates in the learning and keeps an eye on individuals activities.
My kid started an IT A level at what has been called "the best state school in Sheffield". It was deadly dull, the teachers seemed to know little about what they were teaching and probably misunderstood the syllabus. At the end of year one all but one kid failed the AS level so the school withdrew the option to do year 2.