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> The Learning & Work Institute says the number of young people taking IT subjects at GCSE has dropped 40% since 2015. 2015 being the year the IT and ICT GCSEs

> The Learning & Work Institute says the number of young people taking IT subjects at GCSE has dropped 40% since 2015. 2015 being the year the IT and ICT GCSEs (which featured potentially little or no programming) begun being phased out and replaced with a more academically rigorous and programming-focused Computer Science GCSE. Unsurprisingly, this led to a drop in the number of schools offering "IT subjects" at GCSE because it is harder to find qualified teachers for it; and any change like that is likely to depress numbers at least temporarily, and maybe permanently if the new syllabus is objectively harder.

hnlmorg 6y ago
Interestingly my wife is a school teacher and frequently leans on me to create IT lesson plans for her school. She's smart so the issue isn't her capability to understand the subject, the issue is the lessens require teaching Python (originally) and Javascript (later) and the source material isn't very good at explaining programming languages to non-programmers who teach. So I ended up creating a new series of lessons for them that was easier to teach, still taught the fundamentals of programming languages, but was also more fun for the kids to learn. She works at a large school and had that school not been lucky enough to have a spouse who's a developer, I'm not sure what 120+ kids (per year group) would have ended up being taught. Not all schools are so fortunate.
- bertil 6y ago
  I would hate to oblige you, but if you could share either the principles behind that lesson plan, or the plan itself, that would help a lot of teachers. They might not always be strong on respecting intellectual property, but they sure love some on-line organisation. I know I’d love it to help “non-technical” colleagues understand that software is not a priesthood.
  - tim333 6y ago
    There are some good online resources. Udacity 101 and 102 for example https://www.classcentral.com/course/udacity-intro-to-computer-science-320 https://www.classcentral.com/course/udacity-intro-to-compute... Maybe the answer is for teachers who don't know the stuff to follow something like that? Not quite sure how that particular one would work with school kids - might be pitched a bit too high level.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > and the source material isn't very good at explaining programming languages to non-programmers who teach How can you explain something to someone if they have no knowledge about it? It doesn't matter how smart your wife is, this is an impossible task unless you actually learn the thing. It would be like asking someone who doesn't know calculus to create a lesson plan to teach calculus. When you put it like that it sounds pretty ridiculous. That school is definitely lucky that you helped out, but I don't think the root issue is the source material.
  - albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    This is how a lot of teaching works- the teachers often have knowledge marginally above the level of the class they’re teaching, and are teaching out a book/syllabus with no flexibility It doesn’t work for programming because most people haven’t studied it tor years at school (unlike maths, literature, etc.), so can’t help solve the problems that crop up under the hood so often.
    - skissane 6y ago
      > This is how a lot of teaching works- the teachers often have knowledge marginally above the level of the class they’re teaching, and are teaching out a book/syllabus with no flexibility In high school, our computing textbook contained blatant errors. I tried to explain this to the teachers, but soon realised they didn't know anything about the subject at all, they were just repeating the textbook without understanding it. (Example: our textbook falsely claimed TCP/IP used parity bits as an error detection mechanism. No, it uses ones' complement checksums. I referred to RFCs 791 and 793. The teacher had no idea what an RFC was.)
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Yes I know, and I think it's an extremely poor method. My younger siblings have atrocious fundamental math skills because teachers don't understand the fundamentals themselves.
      - cutler 6y ago
a_humean 6y ago
Interesting talk by one of the advisor's of the government's new computing education, Simon Peyton Jones, best know for being one of the main contributors to Haskell's GHC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-AIbtus9gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-AIbtus9gs

hnlmorg 6y ago

Interestingly my wife is a school teacher and frequently leans on me to create IT lesson plans for her school. She's smart so the issue isn't her capability to understand the subject, the issue is the lessens require teaching Python (originally) and Javascript (later) and the source material isn't very good at explaining programming languages to non-programmers who teach. So I ended up creating a new series of lessons for them that was easier to teach, still taught the fundamentals of programming languages, but was also more fun for the kids to learn. She works at a large school and had that school not been lucky enough to have a spouse who's a developer, I'm not sure what 120+ kids (per year group) would have ended up being taught. Not all schools are so fortunate.

bertil 6y ago
I would hate to oblige you, but if you could share either the principles behind that lesson plan, or the plan itself, that would help a lot of teachers. They might not always be strong on respecting intellectual property, but they sure love some on-line organisation. I know I’d love it to help “non-technical” colleagues understand that software is not a priesthood.
- tim333 6y ago
  There are some good online resources. Udacity 101 and 102 for example https://www.classcentral.com/course/udacity-intro-to-computer-science-320 https://www.classcentral.com/course/udacity-intro-to-compute... Maybe the answer is for teachers who don't know the stuff to follow something like that? Not quite sure how that particular one would work with school kids - might be pitched a bit too high level.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> and the source material isn't very good at explaining programming languages to non-programmers who teach How can you explain something to someone if they have no knowledge about it? It doesn't matter how smart your wife is, this is an impossible task unless you actually learn the thing. It would be like asking someone who doesn't know calculus to create a lesson plan to teach calculus. When you put it like that it sounds pretty ridiculous. That school is definitely lucky that you helped out, but I don't think the root issue is the source material.
- albertgoeswoof 6y ago
  This is how a lot of teaching works- the teachers often have knowledge marginally above the level of the class they’re teaching, and are teaching out a book/syllabus with no flexibility It doesn’t work for programming because most people haven’t studied it tor years at school (unlike maths, literature, etc.), so can’t help solve the problems that crop up under the hood so often.
  - skissane 6y ago
    > This is how a lot of teaching works- the teachers often have knowledge marginally above the level of the class they’re teaching, and are teaching out a book/syllabus with no flexibility In high school, our computing textbook contained blatant errors. I tried to explain this to the teachers, but soon realised they didn't know anything about the subject at all, they were just repeating the textbook without understanding it. (Example: our textbook falsely claimed TCP/IP used parity bits as an error detection mechanism. No, it uses ones' complement checksums. I referred to RFCs 791 and 793. The teacher had no idea what an RFC was.)
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Yes I know, and I think it's an extremely poor method. My younger siblings have atrocious fundamental math skills because teachers don't understand the fundamentals themselves.
    - cutler 6y ago

a_humean 6y ago

Interesting talk by one of the advisor's of the government's new computing education, Simon Peyton Jones, best know for being one of the main contributors to Haskell's GHC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-AIbtus9gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-AIbtus9gs