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back to article Aus curriculum consultation skips some, still pleases

Prominent vendors and industry associations are unaware of efforts to develop a new, national, IT curriculum for Australia. The Register last week reported that the curriculum does not, in its current form, include a software development stream. We've since been told by West Australian Education Minister Peter Collier that he …

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  1. Neoc

    How about this:

    Teach kids how a computer works. Most kids leaving school could tell you more about the theory of how cars work then how computers work. And I'm not talking gates or transistors (although if they want to, more power to them) but about the different "units" (the ALU, the stacks, etc.) which are required to make today's technology work.

    I don't know about the rest of you, but when I started University *that* was one of the mandatory classes before we were even allowed near a computing language. (the database stream was even more so - two semesters of data storage and retrieval theory - I started hating ONF and Z by the end of it - before we got to play with SQL)

    Today's schools and university do not turn out programmers, they turn out people who have been taught how to use C#/VB/Java/whatever and who fall apart the moment they are asked to think outside the box - like analyse a logical problem in software.

    Dammit - I still think everyone should do at least one semester of C programming and have to hunt down a Segmentation Violation error as part of their final exam. Without one of the modern hold-your-hand debugger. ^_^

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  2. TimChuma
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    I did a computing degree

    There was also "what is a computer" type subject in the first semester that a lot of my friends in the course blitzed, I needed it though as I never had a computer at home before the course.

    We didn't get to play with SQL until the second semester of the second year and had to pass COBOL first (was leading up to Y2k), the people who didn't have COBOL had to do the SQL subject assignments using C.

    Was lucky to pass one of the subjects that had abstract mathematics, ballied on the computer graphics subject as it had algebra.

    I would recommend at least having a subject where kids get to take apart old computers and put them back together, you can learn a lot from that as I did it for charity for six months.

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