Schoolkids learn coding at GCSE level in curriculum trial

Did my A-levels in 95/96(ish),

only took A/s Computers, so learnt about database design and spreadsheets (boooooring) whilst the A-level students got to learn PASCAL, or somesuch.

Bad decision on my part, but I was 16 at the time (and had just given up trying to teach myself AMOS). Whoever decided to drop "proper" IT from the curriculum, deserves a good shoeing.

Still not looking forward to doing battle with my own kids for control of our home network, though!

When did they stop teaching programming at GCSE?

I didn't even realise that they didn't teach programming at GCSE level any more. I remember (way back in 1990) doing GCSE Computer Studies, part of the coursework was writing our own program in BASIC on a BBC Master.

Which of course came after first learning the basics of getting the turtle to move around the screen and draw things using LOGO.

And who remembers how to do 2's Compliment subtraction

You might not like it

But why not teach them Javascript with HTML/CSS

This means that they do not have to learn any of the clunky 'windows' GUI concepts.

They can just focus on logic and printing things to the 'screen'. They can then make things funky with HTML/CSS.

They don't need any clever environment, no need for a server to run it on, just code single pages.

Bonus is that most computers come with a browser and a basic editor, so the cost of entry is zero.

About time...

Back in the 80's I did my 'O' Level computer studies project in 6502 machine code.

The teacher couldn't even read it.

I was a precocious little sod.

These days I continually bump into degree holding youngsters who look at me with some kind of suspicion when I open a command prompt up and do something magical like a use wildcards on a move command.

*rolls eyes*

Forget teaching programming at school

It's a nice idea, but the reality will be a Government syllabus that awards an A* for anyone who can make the computer display "Hello World!". If you can't work it out and stick a post-it note on the screen with 'Hello World!' scribbled in biro, you'll still get a C. If you shout "Hello World!" through an old kitchen towel tube aimed at the screen and then claim the sound bounced off it, thus technically meaning your teacher received "Hello World!" from the computer screen, you might still actually get an E.

There was a time - THIRTY YEARS AGO - when every kid at school could go into Dixons and enter a bit of Basic to flood the screen with obscenities ("20: goto 10"). Boffins would be able to add a few extra lines to make it beep annoyingly and disable the keyboard, forcing frustrated sales assistants to clamber behind the shelves to switch it off at the mains. Today, the average school kid couldn't do anything like that to a display PC in Currys, despite being in an age of USB sticks which could allow any 13-year-old to get a local web page onto a PC and display actual porn to all the customers. All my generation could do at 13 was make "Brian Jenkins is a spack! And so is his mum!" appear all down a green 12" CRT. We've gone backwards. Backwards!

Kids don't want to program computers, they just want to listen to their iPods and daaaaance to dub step in their own happy world.

And if you are going to teach programming, it should probably become part of maths again at that level. In my experience, people who can't do maths can't do basic Javascript, it just makes their brains hurt. So it would probably be a good idea to let the Maths-6 kids spend two years completing 'Hello World' whilst the Maths-1 kids do some simple web apps or maybe even compile a little Java. Either way, those destined to become programmers are going to find their own way whatever happens.

It's the same as having general 'science' lessons for the kids who don't need to understand physics, chemistry and biology are separate sciences, with even more specialist divisions within.

Started A-Level computing in 2003

And we done Visual basic with a bit of assembly language, alot of access databases and tonnes of binary/hexidecimal. Thrown in amongst the standard hardware and networking stuff.

It was a huge step up from the gcse ICT which taught us how to open word/excel and print a webpage.

OK, so, who are they going to get to teach this?

KenB

So everyone here believes that the whole world should know some programming just because they are likely to use a computer? On the same logic the whole world should know something about the design & maintenance of every commodity item - cars, televisions, etc.

If you go back far enough (senile cackle) you only learned to program after university. It worked very well and there were a lot of programmers about in the '60s.

@What went wrong?

I agree, I started aged 16 in 1981, in the back of the class with our new school computer after my O levels, while our teacher taught 4th years, and the 5th years had left early.

I too surged, went from RMS 380Z basic, and was writing Z80 by the end of term. I suffered withdrawal symptoms over the summer hols, and then I was writing CPM system code at my new sixth form six weeks later with another one.

Where did it all go wrong? I suspect it went wrong because government isn't interested in do-ers.

You'll like this one...

I left school at age 16 in 1990 to take a BTEC ND in Computing at the local college. The careers teacher at my school informed me and my best friend (who also left), that "there's no future in software".

Said teacher went to the same school, did their teaching qualification, then returned to the same school and gave careers advice. Go figure.

Last I heard, he was in charge of IT there. Still, I'm sure everything that he uses was developed before 1990... (eh, Jim...?)

Sounds like

They are going to go back to teaching the things I was taught in my Information Systems GCSE 16-17 years ago...

Not exactly a lot of practical programming in it, but all the theory behind it, data structures, algorithms, interface theory, doing sorting and searching algorithms, trees & linked lists, hashing etc. It was pretty basic stuff to be honest but at least, beyond the first couple of months, it didn't focus on the basic use of applications. Although it was justified back then as these were Archimedes computers, and no-one really had a pc at home.

We even did the interview trick of breaking down the tasks involved in making a cup of tea.

Google

Nellie the computer from 1969, Proper computing, disk oil temperatures and a scary binary count.

Learning coding

The reality is that this will never be main stream. The problem is I have done GCSE ICT, A-level ICT and now a BTEC National Diploma extended in IT practitioner 2nd year and there is a serious lack of qualified teachers in this field. Many of the teachers have little or no understanding especially when I am being taught to program in VB.Net. The reality is that everyone wants to be a computer scientist without realising that there needs to be a greater focus on the conceptual side of computing i.e. matrices, algorithims etc. Britain is seriously mistaken into thinking that it is good to encourage children to become programmers. The reality for me now is that programming is mostly out-sourced as you can get better talent cheaper i.e. outsourcing. An the IT employers of this country want people working in IT to have multiple discipline skills such as Business, interpersonal etc. The type of programmers we need are not ones that learn a little bit about procedural language but rather integrate the programming side into subjects like Maths or Physics, Creating programmers with advanced knowledge comes both from independent learning and problem solving. The most these kids will probably do in reality a little bit of VB.NET or Visual Basic in 60% coursework. If you want good programmers get teachers who know their stuff and tell students to get set text books and do it yourself. Furthermore, what about an emphasis on the other branches of computing such as Cisco networks etc. Programming is just one part of computing as a field. No wonder why Government IT projects are such an epic fail.

From your UK student who has now given up the idea of bothering to do Computer Science at University.

I did A level Computing (AQA) in 2001/2002 and we did a little bit of assembler, some pascal and some prolog stuff. We were taught VB for doing the projects (first year the exam board gave us a problem to solve, second year we had to find our own problem). Although the school dropped this course after I finished as there weren't enough people interested in it and of those who were only a few were intelligent enough to cope with it.

I went to a very old-fashioned grammar school in the 1970s -- everyone did Latin for the first two years, and Ancient Greek was offered at O level.

Everyone did SMP maths, and the SMP maths curriculum at the time included a chapter on programming -- strictly as a paper exercise, for this was before the days of Acorns and Superbrains and Spectra. In the O level year, 1976 for me, everyone did a General Studies certificate which included a class on computer programming, done in Algol-60 (with the stropped punctuation) on coding forms. The nice people at CIBA-Geigy then let the school borrow some of their mainframe time, and our programs were punched on to card-decks, returned to us for dry checking, and, if they seemed OK, eventually run. I still have the card deck for my first executed program lying around somewhere.

Everyone had to do this -- even the people doing Latin and Greek, who usually went on to be barristers.

Myself, I date the Great Competence Evaporation to about 1984, but people who can remember times before then will also recall that happy time when this country could quietly do a few useful things without making a howling pig's breakfast of them.

UK?

By "UK" I assume they mean "England and Wales"? Scotland are already re-writing the Computing and Information Systems syllabi - and in fact combining the two streams to offer pupils an even narrower range of IT-related courses.

Incidentally, games development - using the aforementioned Scratch - is fairly commonplace in S1/S2 (first two years of secondary) up here, and programming is taught as part of the Standard Grade and Intermediate 2 qualifications (both GCSE equivalent courses, though both to be replaced in the next couple of years).

The trouble is...

...where do you get the teachers to teach the kids proper computer science and proper programming skills ? The education system doesn't pay well enough to attract someone with real industry experience so there's no source of teachers there. Unless, of course, they get retired people to teach it.

Also with kids having only been taught crap over recent years, where do you get young teachers with the relevant skills to teach anything other than Word and Excel ?

To really fix CS/IT teaching the government need to raise salaries in teaching enough to attract industry experienced people and also to pay them the going wage while they are doing their teacher training. They'd also have to have a decent curriculum prepared in advance so these experienced people would want to teach it and they'd have to have decent equipment/labs available in the schools.

As someone who has recently been recruiting people to work in my development team I need people who can assimilate any given programming language quickly, can install and configure various operating systems, understand and configure networks, understand low-level bits/bytes etc and have a full, rounded experience of IT in general. Its very hard to get all these skills any more. I came out of University with all of them back in the late 80s but these days all you get is people who can code in Java and know nothing else. This means we always end up recruiting older people who got taught correctly all those years ago or foreign people who still get taught properly.

The whole CS / IT education system from school all the way up to Uni needs fixing.

If I could keep my current standard of living I'd leave industry to teach proper computer science but there's no chance of that right now.

Many missing the point?

"there are quite a lot of things that should be taught to kids before we get to anything as complicated as writing computer code."

and

"Programming is a mindset and not some fixated single computer language."

Amen to both of those, but a big wet raspberry to those who think learning programming is about language A vs language B.

It's about being able to read and understand vague descriptions and ask relevant questions to clarify.

It's about being able to think logically and be numerate.

It's about understanding the importance of correct language vs incorrect language ("should of" rather than "should have", etc).

It's about being able to think "what if" e.g. what if the user input is unexpected format, what if the network fails part way through...

It's about being able to work out how you check whether what you've built will actually work.

Most of these aren't particularly IT skills. But they are "thinking straight" skills, often lacking even amongst so called programmers.

All of these are essential pre-requisites to any serious design+programming project, and to overlook them is to build on sand rather than rock. Which could be part of the reason why so many software projects are not just massively overbudget but fail completely.

This is a good thing

Not that any particular syntax/language is going to be of any relevence by the time they come to use it a few years later, but the sheer fact that computers become slaves not masters is what's most important. Knowing a computer can bend to your whim as opposed to forcing you to comply with its ways is so empowering, and provides the crucial link between hardware and applications.

"everyone did Latin for the first two years"

Beginner's Latin is actually great for this kind of thing, as well as for other modern European languages.

Strict and (largely) consistent and formalisable/analysable grammar, just like most programming languages.

Need to understand the difference between subject, and verb, and object, just like in programming.

Need to be able to construct a grammatically correct sentence, unlike in Powerpoint, but just like in a programming language.

Etc.

[grammar errors above may or may not be intentional]

In my opinion kids brains are being allowed to atrophy at a time when they should be most active in the learning cycle. Part of this atrophying process, and bear in mind that this is my opinion, is through the proliferation of non-learning and anti-social games. I think that kids would find it far more interesting and exciting to make computers do things - and of course that means that you have a far larger community of school-leavers capable of joining application development teams when they leave school, even if they are not necessarily able to go to a university or tertiary college for whatever reason. And that is important. The UK has a rich history in the IT world - it would be very good if that could be used as a catalyst for even greater things.

2 years to code a c++ notepad or forum in php is more work then making a stool in DT

i did it

I did programming at school.....BBC Basic - at home I learnt Spectrum basic - close but very different beast. i started z80 assembler too.

the kids these days think that things 'just work' and seem to think little of how

the interface they are using actually comes about.

Wont someone think of the precious little snowflakes

But , But You mean I have to understand what happens instead of just pressing the shinny buttons? Only geeks or nerds do that you stupid or something . I want my A* for turning up now!

I'm TEACHING GCSE computing at school

In My school we're running the OCR GCSE in Computing.You can choose your language of choice - I'm doing C# because we get visual studio express for free.

RDBMS, networks, security, algorithm development and programming, fetch-execute cycle, binary maths... it's all there.

what I'm miffed about - no-one has mentioned all the schools running this GCSE. There are 3 in oxfordshire - so it's NOT just a 2 term trial, or whatever was mentioned in the article.

"using Visual Studio Express, because it's free"

gcc and Eclipse are also free, and you can use them on a lot more development systems and develop for a lot more targets, not just on/for a Window box and whatever else MS choose to support on any given occasion (IA64? Now you see it, now you don't. Handheld PC? Now you see it, now you don't. MIPS/PPC/Alpha? Now you see it, now you don't.)

But using non-Microsoft software where Microsoft allege they have a comparable alternative will probably break some educational discount agreement your school has with Microsoft.

Be grateful there's no one with a clue on your board of governors.