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!
Because by the time you've persuaded an actual language to produce interesting output, your 11-year old has fallen asleep. Learning doesn't have to be boring.
As it happens, I was looking for a gentle introduction to programming at the weekend and found Scratch. My 10 and 7 year olds have been playing with it since, by choice. I doubt that would have happened if I'd started them on a "proper" language, but scratch is powerful enough for them to learn from experience about spaghetti code and badly named variables.
In fact, I'm stunned that Mr Gove has stumbled upon such a good idea.
... we used pens and paper. There weren't special classes in "writing" after junior school, and you certainly couldn't get a qualification in "writing".
Once the basic skills were learned, they could be used to write in different languages, make mathematical notations, write up science experiments and so on. WP/spreadsheet/database programs are the equivalent of pen and paper - you use them to make something else possible. After the basics are learned at junior school, it becomes the role of the individual subject to teach the children how to use them for that purpose.
Amen. I'll never stop being bitter about the one A-Level IT Module the teacher gave me and a load of friends 100% in, that came back at the end of the two years from the examiners, all marked down to 60%, with no explanation from the teacher or exam board. It was a web design module, and we'd all gone above and beyond the scope of the module since we all had an interest and actually knew HTML etc. (rather than frontpage/publisher). That isn't to say we didn't do the boring bits to tick the modules boxes too.. we did, which was all the more frustrating.
I was in the first year of national gcse's the main reason we got great grades was that we had the benefit of at least 1 year of the relevant O level syllabus for some if not all of the subjects. Having done both mock O levels and real GCSE's I can assure you GCSE's were easier.
In practise you had it harder because your year had a syllabus designed to meet the requirements of the GCSE not potentially exceed it like ours.
Totally agree with you on the A* grade though. Don't any of these idiots understand about normalising the scores to a bell shaped curve as they did with my degree exams?
Most Reg commentards could quickly knock up a list of languages and tools they like or think are important, or a list of things they wish they'd learned at school, or a list of skills they think will be useful to the pupil or the economy. (witness most of the comments on this thread).
Putting together an actual curriculum that will keep kids from either falling asleep or running riot and will give them a set of skills that are provable in an exam or assessment is a whole different thing.
I wasn't really criticising the idea of taking two years to improve the curriculum, more the bizarre idea of throwing the current one away while you do it.
It's like throwing the passengers out of a leaky boat and asking them to tread water while you build a new one.
that the UK will be able to march towards world dominance in Programming[tm]
Especially games, and entertainment, and a bit of quanting, and stuff like that.
This would be a good thing, if it weren't for one or two minor points - like the fact that programming is useless without both industrial and/or management strategy and design, and that practical programming skills have a nasty habit of becoming obsolete fairly quickly. (Just ask a Flash developer.) Especially if they're toy programming skills, like Sketch - nice toy though it is.
So - programming is better than ICT, but a really interesting curriculum would combine development across multiple platforms with some element of useful, non-Hoxton entrepreneurship, perhaps larded with useful negotiation skills.
Gove's mind - if it can be called that - seems to be trained too mechanically to think strategically. Flash some action words at him, and he's putty in the hands of lobbyists and advisors.
Therefore drama and grandstanding and newsbites, but not so much deep insight into real educational needs.
Also, who's going to pay for the teachers to support this bold new effort - the ones who will be giving up highly-skilled contractor posts for the academic front-line?
(Not the Tories, that's for sure.)
Learning to code isn't generally useful, but learning how to control a cursed, wretched, bastard machine that does ONLY and EXACTLY what you tell it to do may well prove to be an essential skill for the general population in the 21st century. A computer is a reasonable platform to practice this skill.
The only major industries we have left in the UK are Service/Retail, Banking and High Technology. There are others but they are pretty small and unlikely to grow in the near future.
Service and Retail don't actually make any money for UK Plc as you can't export either of them, they only redistribute wealth. Very important to society, and a lot of jobs here but doesn't affect the UK's import/export balance sheet.
Banking creates money out of thin air, but much of it is "economically useless" as Adair Turner said, and doesn't employ very many people and is unlikely to grow in terms of jobs as it's already mostly automated anyway.
High Technology is extremely exportable and the UK really does make a lot from this - things like satellites, electronics designs (ARM is *huge*), and software. Maybe we don't manufacture much of it - but we do design it.
Unless we get a notable number of our children into that high technology sector, the high-tech jobs that companies need will go somewhere else and the UK will be properly screwed.
So yes, we do need to teach our children to code, because then we'll find the x% that are great at it much earlier and can inspire them to be the next ARM. or CGI house. Or something else that nobody has even thought of.
At present we're teaching those kids an "ICT" that is really "How to use MS Office". And that is boring - for a start, there is barely enough to fill two terms, let alone a full GCSE course. To make it worse, the pupils that find it most boring are the ones with an aptitude for real IT - so we're deliberately discouraging the very people we need.
I've said it before & I'll say it again, we need better teaching of subjects like English, Mathematics & Biology, Chemistry & Physics (the three sciences) much more than we need CompSci classes in schools.
Let those who wish to do computers explore it in 'addon' classes during a lunch break or after school or on thier own at primary/high school level. Keep it to the colleges & universities who are much better prepared to be able to teach it in a meaningful manner.
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"..taught me PASCAL about 15 years ago. I now have a CS degree and I still think it is the right language to teach people how nice and robust programming can be, as soon as the pupil has mastered the syntax details."
Keep in mind that PASCAL was also designed as a *teaching* language and was "dumbed" down compared to the commercial languages of the time. Possibly it's 2 biggest weaknesses are that most people know it from the Borland version, which lacked at least one *major* feature (the ability to effectively do pointers to functions, a key selling point of C) from the full version and a not very standardised library interface (a *major* contributor to the success of FORTRAN).
I agree that it was small enough to get to know well and teach key concepts, while being complete enough (provided your implementation had hooks into the OS) to do serious work.
""Scratch" is an attempt to dumb down programming and will be nearly as useless as Excel macros. "
Possibly. On the other hand the demands of creating a system that children *wanted* to use was a key driver of a lot of the PARC work, Smalltalk and the Alto workstation design.
Making kids stuff is *anything* but child's play (although at least one of them went on to code a flight simulator using LANDSAT pictures).
Scratch *might* get IDE developers thinking a bit more about how they can help developers slot disparate stuff together without endless thumbing through manuals.
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Talk about aiming low! Computers and word processors are no longer the magic glowing glass window with writing on it that changes, you know. Basic word processor use shouldn't take more than a few weeks, including any familiarisation with the mouse and keyboard for any children who haven't really used them before.
Only it sounds *very* much like that subject.
Seems to demonstrates you can use key PC apps in a basic way (and effectively walk upright without drooling on the floor at the same time).
Took about 1 week for me to do all the exams having studied the CD.
There's a reason it's called the European Computer Drivers *License*
Reprogramming command keys, self modifying code (took me 5 years to find a use for it), compiler construction and parsing was a *totally* different course altogether.
Might I suggest the only *lasting* skill so far has been being learning to touch type.
It's 2012 and how many program by *handwriting* on a tablet ? Speech? Gesture tracking? Direct brain interface?
They also told me every office would be paperless within 10 years of leaving school.
They lied about that too.
I've been horrified what my son has been taught in ICT. Let them learn Word as part of an assignment in English, Excel in an assignment to maths. Relevant, directed, and a break from some of the other stuff but showing how its useful. They can take that to other wordprocessor and spreadsheets once they know what they are for.
About time they might learn to be more than users but stretch them a bit. Not so sure about the let people decide what to teach them, that sounds scary to me... More postcode lottery.
Bring on the Pi though, I was most pleased for my 13 year old to sound excited by it and ask when he could get one!
As title, I talked to the ICT teacher about the content and where I was heading and he said basically it would be irrelevant and pointless for me to do it, the worst thing about teaching students how to use excel etc is that it is repeated year after year. You learn how to make one then are taught the same thing again and again and again.
No wonder its boring
Hysterical much?
There are dozens of companies far more evil than MS who for all their faults make some reasonably good products particularly as we are talking about programming their IDE.
Next time you feel the need to get your pitchfork and shout "burn them" I suggest you point yourself at Armaments, Tobacco and Healthcare companies like PIP.
For all their sins of which there are many MS have rarely if at all hurt people.
"micromanaged by Whitehall"
Why there are far, far, far more important things that needs and must be divested from its Whitehall ubermasters no?
And, dear Minister, please ensure or beware that Whitehall will endeavour to recover the account even if it is purely for the cash cow flow?
Station 168 not listening...
How many british people share these fon memories of IT lessons? Then the "IT teacher" tries to protend he knows what he is doing a gives the old BBC micro a thump on the monitor... "Sorry you'll have to find a nother computer" was the usual response.
After that sitting in pairs trying to learn about the battle of the bulge, or how to make a teletext page... the wonders of british IT lessons.
Is it any wonder that there is an IT shortage? When 30 somethings grow up using BBC micros, and if they were lucky the acorn archimedes.... of course once you get in to the real world you soon realise that no one ever uses these things outside of school. Making everything you have learnt completely useless.
Obviously programming is important (it's been my job since I graduated with a software engineering degree 10 years ago), but it isn't the only part of ICT. I think a good way to get office/secretarial skills in things like Word and Excel would be to include CLAIT or the ECDL as part of the national curriculum. It's not a GCSE but it's a much more useful job-related qualification that even kids who disappear before exams begin could use after leaving school.
As others have said, teach the fundamentals (including why you would use tool X instead of tool Y) and get people working on assignments that allow them to be creative and experiment with things. A pile of Raspberry Pis could be used to teach computer networking, including different machines having different roles like one being a web server and another being a database. Having to choose between Inkscape and Gimp would demonstrate the difference between drawing and painting packages. Setting an assignment to record a video, edit it on a computer and add effects and a sound track would be a good way to introduce some very technical concepts. They could even get people using their mobile phones and understanding what the different settings are. Explaining the difference between a spreadsheet and a database might gradually start to educate people into when you shouldn't use Excel. Another important bit would be how and why to keep information secure, to avoid things like CDs lost on trains and kids hijacking each other's Facebook accounts. There's also lots of ways to get kids into coding which other people have mentioned, but ICT isn't just about that.
Lots of talk about programming and software but not much detail on what if anything is going to be covered regarding operating systems, hardware, networking and the like. I am not a sysadmin but I think anyone seriously considering an IT career needs at least a basic grounding in these areas.
unless there is sufficient investment (i.e. better pay) to attract the right kind of teachers to teach this stuff, it's really not going to work is it?? there's lot's of rhetoric, but there isn't really any detail as to how any of this is going to work is there, and until it does, let's reserve judgement...
I reckon they ought to allow schools to try to attract business sponsorship, and may be even partner with various companies to provide some form of input into teaching these courses - at uni there is quite a bit of involvement, but imo, by that point it's too late...
The real folk who are engaged in real work in this field are the most ideally placed to take some of this responsibility, and I for one, if such a program was available and work were okay with spending an hour or so every so often on it, would gladly participate (I just don't want to be burdened with bullshit lesson plans and all that crap).
at my last work place, they were big on getting into secondary schools and encouraging visits etc. to highlight what they did etc. worked very well.
Amen. I believe computers/technology should replace almost all high-level math (or high-level anything), as it's something everyone will ACTUALLY use... imagine, especially in 10+ years from now. I believe there are several high-level subjects that should become electives only, so kids can focus on new areas that they'll ACTUALLY use... like: conversation, critical thinking, parenting (that shouldn't be an elective. Too many people will become parents, and they're HORRIBLE at it) and "understanding the world" (not like social studies). I think there's SO much to change, but I'm tired right now...
If they are going to teach kids to work with Flash programming.... and how to handle sprites, why not teach them the basics of actionscript? Therefore making a USEFUL contribution, rather than a BASIC form of plagurism using someone elses scripting?
Theres alternatives such as Swish, if Adobe Flash is too expensive?
This is a plagurism of the term 'programming'! Removing the fundamentals... But again Im not saying start with ASM (assembly) language with kids either!
They'll still learn more from programming a very BASIC EEPROM chip in a 'design technology / systems and control' lesson! (its very simillar to the concept here)
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