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Sadly, this will all be reversed in a couple of years by the next minister who will believe that "Children should be taught the essential workplace skills that

Sadly, this will all be reversed in a couple of years by the next minister who will believe that "Children should be taught the essential workplace skills that employers are demanding in the 21st century. Driving schools don't teach their students how to build a car, but how to use one; and schools shouldn't teach their pupils how to build software, but how to use it." [note: I don't believe this myself, just that the next minister will.]

omh 15y ago
But could anyone seriously claim that children are leaving school and not able to use computers? I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail and office applications than students of 5 or 10 years ago. Even if they aren't using them regularly, they're at least familiar with most IT concepts.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  > I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail ... than students of 5 or 10 years ago. I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Newer, more efficient methods of communication have developed, and e-mail in an anachronism to most young people in the era of texting, Facebook messaging, and tweets. Whether swapping a powerful, flexible infrastructure for viewing the world in 140 characters or fewer is progress in a healthy direction is a different question. Then again, we haven't managed to get secure e-mail standardised, solve the spam problem, or reliably prevent malware transmission over e-mail, despite having several decades to work on these problems. I don't think we in the older generations are in much of a position to lecture anyone on how to communicate effectively. I'm hoping that if this is a genuine effort to teach some computing real skills to younger people, part of it will include some exposure to these sorts of issues so perhaps they can do a better job of it than we have.
  - estel 15y ago
    I suspect that you're wrong. My experience seems to be that pupils of secondary age and onwards are well accustomed to using multiple media for various usecases. For talking to friends or family? Facebook or text. That work assignment that their teacher is distributing to everyone? They'll probably send an email.
  - gmac 15y ago
    I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Yes -- I was surprised (and somewhat weirded out) recently to discover that my younger sister, who's in her early twenties, thinks of email exclusively as a formal communications channel, and never emails her friends (she texts or Facebook-messages them instead).
    - omh 15y ago
      I'd never heard it in quite those terms before, but that echoes the way that my generation might consider e-mail to be for talking to friends and physical letters to be "formal".
- ig1 15y ago
  You need to be very careful about things like this, you're making big assumptions that could have huge consequences. What do you think the computer literacy rate is for children who don't have computers at home ? - it's easy to assume that computers are ubiquitous and everyone uses them all the time but it's far from true. The children most likely to be computer illiterate are also the ones from the most financially and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. If you cut them off from getting an IT education at school what do you think that does to their employment and social mobility prospects ? You can't just design educational systems aimed at the "average" student, you need to cater to every student.
eblackburn 15y ago
Agree with your analogy. We always learn how to pass the driving test, never how to drive. Qualifications and certificates galore. Zero benefit.
jofo25 15y ago
Unfortunately, I really agree with this analogy. I can see this move to programming being beneficial for England's IT sector but I don't think it will be popular when implemented in schools. I hope it is though! Many students will really love learning to code but I can see a far greater proportion of others taking a real dislike to it. Overall, I guess it depends on the methods in which it is taught.
jiggy2011 15y ago
This is true, there is allot of differences between a driving school and a normal school. One is supposed to set you up with life skills whereas the other one teaches you 1 specific skill well enough that you probably aren't going to kill anyone within a week of getting behind the wheel. I would argue a school course focused around cars for example would contain a component on basic mechanical skills as well as the workings of a combustion engine. I wouldn't advocate not teaching any applications software at all but this could be taught alongside other work such as writing and communications skills. I also wouldn't teach "softare development" as such, at least not in the sense of having exams on J2EE or Android development. I would try to focus on teaching that computer software is malleable , many people today see software as a magic lack box that only some sort of sorcerer can create, even with the web. When I first got online all of the internet savvy kids in class knew at least basic HTML and built their own website by copying chunks of script from various places. Now many peoples idea of expressing themselves online is using the discreet boxes provided by facebook and twitter. I would teach basic python (starting with the REPL and perhaps using PyGame or Panda3D in the advanced classes although possibly through a simplified wrapper library). I would also teach HTML/CSS + Simple JS and show students how to create a website where people could download their programs. Databases would be introduced later as a means of persisting data from other programs they had previously created. Even if we did not create many professional programmers I would hope that students would be able to identify more easily problems which could be efficiently solved by computers and also identify appropriate tools to solve them with.

omh 15y ago

But could anyone seriously claim that children are leaving school and not able to use computers? I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail and office applications than students of 5 or 10 years ago. Even if they aren't using them regularly, they're at least familiar with most IT concepts.

Silhouette 15y ago
> I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail ... than students of 5 or 10 years ago. I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Newer, more efficient methods of communication have developed, and e-mail in an anachronism to most young people in the era of texting, Facebook messaging, and tweets. Whether swapping a powerful, flexible infrastructure for viewing the world in 140 characters or fewer is progress in a healthy direction is a different question. Then again, we haven't managed to get secure e-mail standardised, solve the spam problem, or reliably prevent malware transmission over e-mail, despite having several decades to work on these problems. I don't think we in the older generations are in much of a position to lecture anyone on how to communicate effectively. I'm hoping that if this is a genuine effort to teach some computing real skills to younger people, part of it will include some exposure to these sorts of issues so perhaps they can do a better job of it than we have.
- estel 15y ago
  I suspect that you're wrong. My experience seems to be that pupils of secondary age and onwards are well accustomed to using multiple media for various usecases. For talking to friends or family? Facebook or text. That work assignment that their teacher is distributing to everyone? They'll probably send an email.
- gmac 15y ago
  I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Yes -- I was surprised (and somewhat weirded out) recently to discover that my younger sister, who's in her early twenties, thinks of email exclusively as a formal communications channel, and never emails her friends (she texts or Facebook-messages them instead).
  - omh 15y ago
    I'd never heard it in quite those terms before, but that echoes the way that my generation might consider e-mail to be for talking to friends and physical letters to be "formal".
ig1 15y ago
You need to be very careful about things like this, you're making big assumptions that could have huge consequences. What do you think the computer literacy rate is for children who don't have computers at home ? - it's easy to assume that computers are ubiquitous and everyone uses them all the time but it's far from true. The children most likely to be computer illiterate are also the ones from the most financially and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. If you cut them off from getting an IT education at school what do you think that does to their employment and social mobility prospects ? You can't just design educational systems aimed at the "average" student, you need to cater to every student.

eblackburn 15y ago

Agree with your analogy. We always learn how to pass the driving test, never how to drive. Qualifications and certificates galore. Zero benefit.

jofo25 15y ago

Unfortunately, I really agree with this analogy. I can see this move to programming being beneficial for England's IT sector but I don't think it will be popular when implemented in schools. I hope it is though! Many students will really love learning to code but I can see a far greater proportion of others taking a real dislike to it. Overall, I guess it depends on the methods in which it is taught.

jiggy2011 15y ago

This is true, there is allot of differences between a driving school and a normal school. One is supposed to set you up with life skills whereas the other one teaches you 1 specific skill well enough that you probably aren't going to kill anyone within a week of getting behind the wheel. I would argue a school course focused around cars for example would contain a component on basic mechanical skills as well as the workings of a combustion engine. I wouldn't advocate not teaching any applications software at all but this could be taught alongside other work such as writing and communications skills. I also wouldn't teach "softare development" as such, at least not in the sense of having exams on J2EE or Android development. I would try to focus on teaching that computer software is malleable , many people today see software as a magic lack box that only some sort of sorcerer can create, even with the web. When I first got online all of the internet savvy kids in class knew at least basic HTML and built their own website by copying chunks of script from various places. Now many peoples idea of expressing themselves online is using the discreet boxes provided by facebook and twitter. I would teach basic python (starting with the REPL and perhaps using PyGame or Panda3D in the advanced classes although possibly through a simplified wrapper library). I would also teach HTML/CSS + Simple JS and show students how to create a website where people could download their programs. Databases would be introduced later as a means of persisting data from other programs they had previously created. Even if we did not create many professional programmers I would hope that students would be able to identify more easily problems which could be efficiently solved by computers and also identify appropriate tools to solve them with.