Kids should be making software, not just using it - Gove Education Secretary Michael Gove today proposed killing off Blighty's ICT curriculum in September to give it a thorough reboot. Launching a consultation into his plans, Gove suggested that from the start of the next academic year, schools should be able to teach what they want in computer classes. The Tory minister recommended …
> Practically anyone but the educationally subnormal can program.
I don't think I agree with that.
Practically anyone can write something that executes. But to catch all the corner-cases requires an attention to detail that I find largely lacking in most people I meet.
The practical upshot of all this is that practically anyone can write crap, but it takes a really *pedantic* class of coder to write something defensive...
Vic.
I guarantee that most of the IT guys from my generation the BBC B/Master era were not taught by CS grads we were taught by people with something far more important enthusiasm and passion.
My GCSE teacher raised the funds for his computer lab almost single handedly and was a great teacher.
I'm one of the downvoters. In principle, I agree with what you are saying (i.e. put some money into producing the teachers.). However, I don't think we *need* a maths graduate to teach maths to sub-degree classes, history graduate to teach history to sub-degree classes, nor IT graduates to teach IT to sub-degree classes. What we need is excellent teachers with moderate specialisations. "Teaching" should be, in general, a graduate subject in itself, not a bolt-on for people who wanted to something else, but couldn't find a job and so drifted into teaching as a way to pay the bills. (However, of course, there should be a way for people with other skills to become teachers if they wish).
What I am saying is that a good teacher of any given basic subject does not need to have an in-depth knowledge of it. For instance, I remember being taught the same subject by (first) a very good teacher of maths, for whom the subject was not her speciality, but which she taught excellently, bringing me up to the standard where I was transferred from the CSE group to the O-level group - an achievement for both of us. However, the new group was taught by a mathematically very good recent maths graduate, but with no teaching skills at all. I did get an O-level, but only just, and only by going to the first teacher for help.
Having got to the O-level class, the reason why you then under-performed was because your teacher was fundamentally poor rather than his or her maths qualification.
I work in education. Teaching is a different skill than being able to code, or research history, or work in engineering. We absolutely need professional teachers and for the most part have them, but we can't expect the highest quality, detailed education, especially beyond O-level from teachers who are not specialists in their field. The best outcome is achieved by those who have a detailed knowledge & understand their subject matter and at the same time can teach effectively - quite a challenge, but one we must rise to if we want the best for our young people.
yeah becouse powerpoint and excel use is something most kids don't pick up in those other classes anyway... o wait
Knowing an ICT teacher who says that basically it's crap and a waste of time and doesn't teach anything that students don't learn in other lessons and having done ICT towards the end of the 90s and having had a brother who did it into the 00's and friends that only recently left college I can say it's moved on little from an abject waste of time, I remember it focusing on speed typing and me and the other kids basically used it as an opportunity to do nothing. Often the work in an ICT lesson was "write up your home work from another lesson."
I didn't even bother going for it as a gcse subject.
Bring it! Go back more than a couple of hundred years and you'll find that most of them were a bunch of c__ts who would make very unpleasant company indeed. You wouldn't be able to find a boot big enough to kick their arses out of your house if they invited themselves round for dinner, which by all accounts they did if you were rich enough and on their radar.
By all means learn about what some of these tyrants and their chums did, and particularly why all that was very bad and not what we should be aiming for as a species, but learning the names by rote as if it somehow confers intellect is just padding out time for the pupils and phoning it in on the part of the educators involved.
At school, I'd rather have learned about the historical events that influence and explain the world as it is today than what the names of the wives of King Henry the C__t were.
Eh? It *IS* dull and uninspiring - not to mention a pile of shite. Building webpages in MS Publisher for GCSE IS? Do me a favour... When was the last time you saw something interesting, online, get built in Publisher? Virtually everything in IS and ICT was introduced to kids years before they started taking it as a lesson.
Existing ICT teachers need a kick up the arse. They're just taking a salary for supervising an hour of web browsing, as it is.
I remember messing about with Dark Basic and the joy my little 5 year old got from changing a few values in the "scripts" I had written to bounce 3D apples and footballs around the screen was priceless. She loved changing the values and seeing the effects on the screen in front of her, it wasn't just push a button and something happens she started thinking about what effect different numbers had on how the balls bounced around the screen. Alright it wasn't rocket science but it was enough to get her to realise basic cause and effect in a simple logical experiment.
We need to give kids some kid of feedback from computers, realise there is more to computers than just tools. If after they have been taught what's going on behind all those windows they decide to go further great, if not well at least they may not take their gadgets quite so much for granted in future.
My partner at the times daughter was good at cause and effect - she was generally the cause of stunned disbelief - the causation of which she enjoyed no end, as well as the results (Laura & I were usually laughing too hard to tell her off). This girl by the way is a pretty blonde blue eyed cherub with a PhD in looking innocent...
The highlight of her career thus far was, at the age of 4, when asked by the Sunday School teacher of all people "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was to wait until she was sure everyone was listening.. and say very loudly and clearly "I wanna be a lesbian when I grow up...". The teacher was stunned, L was in hysterics with laughter - and all the parents had that 'oh god' look because they knew full well the next question from their kids would be "whats a lesbian...?".
We dont give kids enough credit for what they pick up and when in this country. Its plain fact that kids learn very quickly from 3 years old or so, and it gets slower as time progresses. So it amazes that kids 3-10 are basically treated like buck toothed idiots in general, and then suddenly become sinks for information at 12? no wonder they lose interest. Its I think a subset of that thing where peoples perception says kids dont have a sexuality or healthy interest in the opposite sex/same sex/both at once/family dog until their gender expression and sexuality chip is installed at 00:00 GMT on their 16th birthday.
Practically any child has the ability to do practically anything (I mean, if William Hague can be in the government, theres hope for us all), so its criminal that we proscribe and control the very people we are berating 5 or 10 years later for being apathetic and disconnected.
Whilst I agree that schools need to teach computer science rather than ICT, I can't see how this particular idea can possibly work in practice.
If schools can teach what they want then every school will be teaching something different. How are the exam boards going to cope with that? What if a school teaches SQL and C++ and the exam questions are on HTML and Cobol?
Yes, probably.
There is no point in asking school kids to write an accountancy package. Boring!
What we need is school kids to be enthusiastic. So get them to write something they would like to write.
Games can teach them a lot of things. It is also likely to teach them the importance of performance rather than just assuming that Intel will make a faster box soon so if your app runs like shit, do worry the hardware will fix it one day. The kids will want it to work well now, so they can play NOW.
It's a great step forward. My serious concern, and this is from experience, is a lot of programming is beyond IT (I refuse to call it ICT) teachers. This really does need addressing first with proper training where applicable and not just some hodge bodge resources thrown together from the Internet.
The Scratch Web site has some documentation aimed at teachers, and teachers in the US have been building their own scratch 'projects' - there is a lot out there in terms of lesson planning already.
Scratch is programmed in Squeak (modern form of SmallTalk). You can export programs as Java applets. You can (with a bit of jiggery pokery) access Squeak core objects from within the Scratch graphical front end. You can add your own extensions.
Could be fun if the educrats can avoid smothering it all with assessment requirements...
Well at least in the case of primary schools, where one teacher is supposed to be able to teach every subject, they are having enough trouble already. Primary schools already seem to have given up teaching maths. My youngest is just in his last year of Primary school, his assessment for maths indicates who'd be doing well for someone two years old, but he'd barely covered the topics I covered at ago 7. Basically no algebra, no trig, wouldn't know what a log was to save his life, never been asked to solve anything.
Sadly I don't think the teachers that are there are going to be able to teach people the logical thought process involved in learning to program.
Unless you have enthusiastic teachers who are personally interested in computers and programming, I can see them struggling.
Still I suspect that soon many of the kids will be able to help the teachers learn it.
I haven't kept up with how things have changed in teaching at primary level, but I'm fairly certain that (in the 1960s) my teachers were not expert in anything other than teaching. Between starting school and 7yoa I certainly only had one teacher for everything, and I was never below the curve in any subject (except PE!) I worry that this endless specialisation and measurement is part of the educational problem. Find enthusiastic teachers, remove the constraints, and let the kids fly!
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