Not the Biggest Shock
I enrolled to gain my PGCE Secondary last september in CS after graduating, and I agrre alot with this article.
The plans laid out for the curriculum are very ambitious indeed -not unachievable, but very ambitious.
I agree though that training teachers properly is the only way this will succeed.
One of my interests in the new curriculum was that it is a chance to build some key soft skills through CS, as well as stronger national skills in maths and problem solving (that was my utopian dream anyway )
CS can be the driest subject in the world to both learn and teach - they require a level of curiosity, and at the moment schools seem to be teaching them as if they are teaching times tables in a Victorian factory school.
Get the kids working together to solve problems -computer science is not just coding!
The other mistake I have seen alot is that they use the computers for everything they do. Students don't need to record their binary homework on a word document, and then encouraged to save it within a file structure that is meaningless. I have spent quite a few lessons showing them how to save work - all I wanted to do was give them a pen and paper and stick them in pairs.
Thanks
(an ex-student teacher who went back to developing)