Schoolteachers can't teach our kids to code, say engineers

The few the proud, the geeks?

I think less than 1 out of 100 people have what it takes to be good programmers based on what I saw from watching multiple hundreds of students. As a teachers aid in an early 80s high school, I could easily tell the ones who were enlightened and the ones that were never going to get it. Most of the good ones were pushed on to other things much like the very few who had the proper skills to operate an electric guitar. Programmers need to understand that computers only move numbers and do simple sums and everything else is just delusions based on that. To use the tool means you have to have an understanding of the annoyingly simple as well as the complex problem at the same time. I don't think 99% of the population is cut out to do that.

Why bring one abbreviation into the shower...

...when you can bring three! Or even four, if you include the T in ICT and CDT. Seriously DfE, if you need to abbreviate a term due to a lack of space (and the table appears to have sufficient space in the LH column for this not to be the reason), then have the decency to stick to just one variation, and preferably pick the one that most people would use and recognise.

Tech - fair enough, don't think you'd find many people who wouldn't know what this expands to

Technlgy - yuk, looks like the o key is broken

Tech'ogy - yuk, just looks wrong.

what's programming?

IT experts I work with don't really need to program either - just copy/paste, document, and write mails to India.

Mind you, even great poets only copy/paste intelligently, as eloquently documented in 1927: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-the-road-to-xanadu-john-livingston-lowes-789383.html.

You might as well teach kids to apply intelligence in a mind-numbing world - and "word" will do fine for that.

Attitude vs. Aptitude

Not everyone has what it takes to program. Its a state of mind more than anything and you can' t teach that, really. It either comes or it doesn't.

All really good programmers I've ever met are self-taught in response to having to figure out how to do it right for themselves for something work related. Usually. They realised they had a flair and a turn of mind for it.

An organised methodical mindset with a feel for problem solving generally -- those types make the best engineers and programmers. It can't really be taught, just encouraged and have some formal structure placed around it.

I can't see this working unless the kids actually care about programming and do it as a separate course rather than rolled into a generic IT class.

When I was doing GNVQ IT at school (admittedly a few years ago now) we had 5 lessons a week, 1 lesson was taken by a maths teacher who had a free period and might have had a computer at home, which qualified him to take the class, 2 lessons by a mid-late 20's lady who had a nice pair-sonality and seemed fixated on everything being done in powerpoint presentation format.

The other 2 lessons were taken by someone who actually knew what he was talking about, ran the school network and smelled like tobacco and coffee (he also had a more than passing resemblance to Penfold from dangermouse) he was a great guy.

Unfortunately he had to dumb down the programming section of the course for the normal, non-geeky, students who had a hard time finding the @ key. You know the kind, the one's that type by floating their index finger randomly around above the keyboard until they find the letter they want. We ended up doing DOS batch files as a form of programming!

Calm down people....

The Honourable Minister is clearly wrong, but their are still benefits in exposing kids to programming.

In many universities first year computer science has one of the highest drop out/ failure rates of all courses. This tends to be for two reasons:

(1): In many places, this is their first exposure to programming. Many kids turn up at university under the illusion that because they like games and know how to use Facebook they are computer geniuses and are destined to be great computer scientists. Many are shocked to find that they actually have no aptitude for programming and owning an iPad gives you no advantage.

(2): Very few kids actually get exposed to programming and can find out whether or not they have the aptitude. Mathematics is typically used as a measure for possible programming aptitude but that's pretty broken. Until they either do well or crash out at university they get no inkling of how good they might be.

As a result most first year university programs will show a bimodal distribution of those that "get it" and pass with 70+ percent and those that don't and fail with 40% or less.

But programming aptitude cannot be taught. Those ICT teachers with skills in mouse wiggling and setting fonts in Word processors are unlikely to be able to grasp programming sufficiently to teach it.

Unfortunately government ministers don't understand this distinction.

Doomed to Fail

This can never work. Here's why. If I were a school teacher, and I learned how to write code, I would immediately quit being a school teacher and get a job writing code. I don't know how it is in the UK though.

Tuppence ha'penny's worth

About the only useful thing they taught on O level 'Computer Studies' was some veeery basic architectural stuff, and the fact that computers could be programmed. The rest of it was up to us kids really. There were those who were self starters who went and taught themselves a bit of BASIC, maybe Pascal, etc, mostly on Spectrums and the few PCs that were around. Then there were those who just weren't interested. I left school knowing C quite well, which in those days was pretty much the most useful thing you could know!

For those of use who were interested, it worked just fine. Electronics Engineering at university added some polish (i.e. learnt architectures properly), but the whole point of university is that it is certainly up to one's self to learn.

pointless.

This seems to be pointless to me, i learned about computers because i was interested in them. I didn't have to be coaxed into doing it. I think this is just a cop out for putting more of a focus on getting kids to think about what they are interested in and what they might like to do. Then work on the key skills to help them achieve this aim. Coaxing children into a subject doesn't gaurentee they'll stick with it, afterall given the profit margin of most iFail apps (or Android for that matter) you won't be making anything from them in the future! Stepping from their code base to work with an actual business level system is a massive jump and i'd question the value of being able to write apps on phones and the suchlikes in comparison.

I learned programming the right way around in my opinion, how a computer works first and then how to program for it. I know people who learned the other way and they just aren't as good. With this in mind i don't see how this would be valuable to add to their curriculum in place of other more important generalised key skills, as has been said already.

Way back in the mists of time I went from A Level Computing writing BASIC/COMAL on a BBC Master to the 1st year of a CompSci degree writing Modula-2 (as the intro 3GL) on a Sun Sparc 5. I must say I found the jump a bit challenging and aside from a bit of Eiffel and VB (yes I know) I never really recovered. Which may explain why I'm now a sys admin, though every now and again I do get comments from devs asking if I used to code foir a living.

So to make the jump out of school, I think not only do you have to have kids interested in such things, but with a decent mindset/view and also having being taught a suitable programming language.

Problem solving

Schools are to educate, not train

Education covers basics such as the 3 Rs, basic science (esp. biology as we seem good at forgetting we and the world are "biological"), introduction to literature, history, geography and a foreign language, with a lot of emphasis on problem solving and understanding. This equips children for an ever changing working and LIVING environment and gives them some sense of their place in the world, culture and society, with the open mindedness, one hopes, to adapt and learn.

Training is directed towards a particular career, job or skill. We do not demand that children learn dentistry, hair cutting, engine maintenance or house building. We do want them to possess a good basic education that prepares them for training and gives them the ability to choose and change as the world changes. Just a thought, how much training did schools give Newton, Darwin, Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Mendel, da Vinci, Brunel, Turing, Frisch and so many others in the fields in which they made their names? But they did generally have a d-d good basic education, often consisting mainly of the classics being drummed into them, along with the basics of the 3 Rs and a foreign language, though one must say that what they considered "basic" arithmetic would probably flummox the modern school child.

I am, certainly, a hardened sceptic: but I have met some clever people with some form of computing degree; very few of them (and none whom I work with now) seem to have the discipline to work with others or to follow basic engineering processes, such as a proper analysis and design, properly (or at all) structure code in any language or design and run adequate testing, understand, submit their ccde/documents to review or be prepared to do reviews. Of the younger ones and most of the offshore staff, anything other than a Windows click-and drag interface has got them frightened to death. If they do write a shell script, for instance, it tends to be a cut and paste from their typing at a command prompt.

The best engineers I have worked with have been anthropologists, a couple of biologists and quantum chemists, a classics scholar and a dropped-out medic.. These are adaptable, open and understand the why and how of engineering and the needs of end users.

Computer course graduates seem to be stuck on whatever their lecturers told them, be unaware of the world outside Windows ar a Linux GUI, stick with Java come what may, be semi-literate and have no idea about end users or even of the poor sods who have to run the systems. (Confession: I hold a higher degree in something perilously close to "informatics").

No, leave the kids alone. Educate them for life in a changing world where the ability to solve problems, adapt to change in job or environment and have a healthy perspective on one's place, culturally and socially, are enormous and rare strengths. Particular skills can be learned as they become necessary, given the strong foundation. I would even go so far as to say, ban computers from schools. Teach the children self reliance and good judgement.

CSS or Flash

My lad was in deep s**t when he made navigation buttons for his ICT website using CSS instead of Flash - the teacher didn't understand CSS. Apart from that it was largely learning how to use MS Office - but not at a very deep level.

An earlier generation of IT developers was largely self-taught on the BBC micro. What's required isn't teaching but the availability of an easy to use toolkit that delivers interesting results fairly easily but has scope to dig deeper (like transitioning from BBC Basic to inserting bits of machine code).

Successful teaching is stimulating a desire to know more. Stick the teacher with a strictly defined curriculum and learning goals and the task of "inspiring" goes out of the window.

I'm a biology teacher, but about ten years back I wound up doing a couple of years teaching AS and A2 ICT, because I was well, a bit geeky and had my own memory stick (70MB I think).

It was the most sterile, pointless and bafflingly arbitrary educational experience I’ve ever had (and I had to introduce “key skills” to my school, so I know what I’m on about). I found myself recounting the exciting role played by Winchester discs in modern back-up regimes, and getting the students to make bullet-point lists of things they could say about ergonomic office furniture. I’m happy to say we’ve ditched the whole thing now. Maybe it is important to teach programming, maybe not. It would have to be more engaging than the tripe I was required to serve up. Based on my own experiences, home plumbing, wiring your own mains electrics, how to use a chainsaw and how to replace rotten bits of window-frame would have been far more life-enhancing.