8 ms·

Learning “computer code” will be offered in French primary schools

98 points by Furzel 12y ago

Furzel 12y ago
Quick summary : The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher. For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers. Personal opinion : While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).
- aikah 12y ago
  In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, yet the government want pupils to learn programming ? same old french bullshit. Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody. That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a few hands and a total distrust of institutions.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - fzltrp 12y ago
    > In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, Define basic teaching. > a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, Reference?
  - mousa 12y ago
    I fail to see how the French kids' ability to write would be hurt by their being introduced to programming. Maybe you think the solution to their not being able to write is to sacrifice all other subjects to focus on writing. Though I doubt the writing is that bad, if it's the case I'd probably axe history before programming.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    > a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool Maybe it's time to simplify the French language. After all, we get along just fine in English without l'imparfait du subjonctif.
- mackwic 12y ago
  In the short run, I agree to say that the formation will be very bad and could turn teenagers out of the code with bad experiences, which is a shame. However in the long run, with IT being more and more present, and the global pool of users being more and more mature, I think that's a good thing which will open great perspectives to our teenagers. Moreover the educational program can be adapted with the feedback of the field. We shouldn't spit in the soup, this is a good measure.
- bpatrianakos 12y ago
  What is it a step forward for? A popular opinion on HN seems to be that programming should be taught in schools because it's somehow a new basic skill everyone should have? I have to disagree and don't see it being a step forward for anything. Programming after hours, taught as a kind of extracurricular activity seems sufficient to me. There's no need to know how to program a computer. Knowing how to use a computer is the important skill. You don't need to know how to rebuild a transmission to drive a car in the same way you don't need to know how to build a web page to know how to input text into form fields and click a submit button. Those who are curious and interested will learn to build the things we use while others will find it more than enough to simply to know how to use the things the rest of us have built. I, like anyone else here, am super passionate about programming and it thrills me to be able to make a computer do my bidding but my friends and family don't care how the computer works. That's okay. I know a carpenter. I love living in a well built home but don't really care to know how to build one. Knowing how to work a stud finder to hang a painting is enough for me.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot. We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs. The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.
roma1n 12y ago
It should be noted that France had a nice, Papert-style "programming" curriculum centered on Logo in the eighties. Specific computers (hey, it's France) were developed, such as the Thomson TO7. And then... Nothing.
- mackwic 12y ago
  You forgot OCaml, our national pride ! Our CS researcher have a large expertise in proofs and static analysis with Coq, Coccinelle and the like.
  - aikah 12y ago
    yep, and TurboPascal and Delphi ,then I moved abroad to study and I didnt even know C ...
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I was part of that generation. IIRC most kids didn't give a damn about it. At that age everything is just a weird random novelty. It was exciting for the device though, TO7 and lightpen were cute. Beside in the 80s, computers weren't a thing, even video games were barely established at home. And LOGO didn't feel like programming, turtling was felt more about geometry (left is down if facing left) than anything else, at least to me. We didn't really go into iterations and such. I hope the new effort will use books like Code http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Software/dp/0735611319 http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa... or something similar that don't take a macbook air for granted but instead use down to earth first principles that can be shown, built and tested with kids hands. For slightly older kids, wishing for HtDP inspired classes.
tenfingers 12y ago
In Italy I had the first programming introduction at 11, using Commodore 64 and the language used for teaching was Logo. Logo had to be loaded from 5" floppy disks. Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year), we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead. Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing during these classes). Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with programming at all. At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms, while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot. The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split in two parts: * basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle") * applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle Nothing much learned in these classes, if anything actually. I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I only have shitty memories about these times. Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear, especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids anything. In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have. You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system.
- Furzel 12y ago
  I totally get your point, when your passionate about something, as a student you need someone really good to teach you. And thus the issue when non passionate teachers ends up teaching something because they have to and not because they like it. In the end I believe the point of CS lectures at such a young age is not to actually teach people programming but more let them know that this field exist, how it basically works and light the spark for some students. I've seen a lot of people when I was in engineering school going 'Ho my god I wish I had knew about CS before, would have saved me a lot of time' ( And some going the other way ). Having these kind of revelation 10 years before can only be something positive .
guylhem 12y ago
As a kid in France (in the late eighties, quite young, but I can't remember when precisely), I had some "programming classes", using Logo on Thomson computers - http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this day. I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting thing was that it allowed experimenting. Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the interpretation, ie BUGS!!! What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.
GuiA 12y ago
According to other sources, it seems like what will be taught is HTML: http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-html-propose-en-primaire-des-la-rentree/ http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-h... The posted article also points out that the classes will be "périscolaire", i.e. outside of regular class hours. This means that the teachers who teach those courses will have to stay late. Only the super-committed teachers will volunteer to do that - and it's not a given that there will be such a teacher in every school. And even when there is, remember that the French school day typically finishes at 4.30p. The teacher will have to attempt teaching a group of exhausted pre-teens who just want to go home. Additionally, again as mentioned in the article, almost a third of schools (16 000 out of 54 000) in France don't have access to high speed internet - and many, many students from the lower social groups may not have internet/computers at home. The government says that in September, half of these 16k schools will magically get high speed internet access through radio links. If history teaches us anything, those 9k schools certainly won't all get working internet overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if most schools still won't really have a functional internet by September 2015. And internet is not everything either- those schools (mostly rural and/or underfunded districts) are also very likely to have just a few, outdated computers for the whole school, without a budget to address that. As someone with a graduate degree in computer science, extensive experience teaching CS/programming to kids/teenagers/adults, and an avid follower of work done by Piaget, Papert, Abelson, etc., I'm absolutely all for exposing children to computational ideas early, and using them to support and enhance learning. I've taught many such classes with kids 6-12 myself, and it can be done very successfully- even with kids who are not that interested in the first place. Unfortunately here, it seems like it's a reactionary measure taken by our government to not be behind similar initiatives in the US and other countries, without much thought given into it. The fact that it is called "apprentissage du code informatique" rather than "apprentissage de la programmation" (or even "apprentissage de l'informatique") is not ideal either; the first thing that I associate it to is "apprentissage du code de la route" (classes that teach the laws behind driving, which you have to take before your driver's license in France), an association that I am sure many non-tech savvy parents or teachers will make in some way. With the taste French government has for putting certifications and "brevets" on everything, this is going to get silly quite fast (I remember the B2i I had to take in middle school, a "certificate" for internet & computers that we obtained after being taught what was essentially an internet explorer class by a shop teacher who was way out of his depth). Interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ministre de l'Éducation is merging effective, proven 2-year university diplomas that produce high quality computer technicians (who can then easily take on a computer engineering/computer science degree) with tangentially related electronic engineering ones, just to save money: http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-et-reseaux-pour-l-industrie-et-les-services http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-.... Things like the latter will definitely hurt France's ability to compete on the international tech scene. On the other hand, I'm not sure teaching HTML after class hours in schools were teachers are already overworked and lacking critical resources will do much.
LukeB_UK 12y ago
As of September, programming is a mandatory part of the curriculum in UK schools.
- igravious 12y ago
  I did not know that. Go UK :) After a little digging here is an outline of the curriculum. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...
  - MarcScott 12y ago
    Here's a better guide that teachers will be using to guide student learning. http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/original.pdf http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/origina...
nawitus 12y ago
Finland will[1] something similar. Programming will be taught from the first grade upwards, but the few first grades will use teaching methods like Computer Science Unplugged[2]. 1. http://koodi2016.fi/ http://koodi2016.fi/ 2. http://csunplugged.org/ http://csunplugged.org/
pling 12y ago
They're teaching my daughter python here in the UK at age 10. I got taught BASIC (BBC BASIC) and some ARM assembler [1] in 1992 at school in maths. [1] ARM assembler because our maths teacher was moonlighting selling RISCOS software and was quite helpful.
sfermigier 12y ago
That's terrific news. The official word used is "coding", not "programming", which leaves a slightly bad aftertaste. Anyway, there is already an option for the scientific students in the last year of high school, the so called "Computer and digital science" (https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-informatique-et-sciences-du-numerique-en-terminale-s https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-inform...).
hayd 12y ago
Haskell.
tonfa 12y ago
Could someone fix the title? There is nothing about enforcing, this won't be mandatory (and may not even be available in all schools).
- dang 12y ago
  We've attempted to.
mknits 12y ago
Don't force, please. Period.
thrush 12y ago
Google Translated to English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fsociete%2Farticle%2F2014%2F07%2F13%2Fl-apprentissage-du-code-informatique-sera-propose-au-primaire-en-septembre_4456197_3224.html&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks. Hacker News is an English-language site. This is not to disparage content in other languages; it's just what the site is. Posts not in English will mostly be demoted, unless they're of major significance and not available in translation.
olivierlacan 12y ago
I learned basic electric circuitry in primary school in basically the same context (extra-curricular activity the hour after regular classes end, once a week) and it was great. We learned how to solder stuff on circuit boards (yes, soldering irons, yes some kids burned themselves, big whoop), how to use glue guns (again, I burned myself a bit, nothing serious) to put components together when assembling basic machines. Can you even imagine the kind of amazing physical computing kids could be doing with Arduino and Raspberry Pi these days. HTML & CSS seem like a no brainer. I learned those in a "Technology" (in regular class hours) during my last year of middle school (again, in Paris). If it weren't for a sympathetic instructor who told us to do make a website using FrontPage on anything we were passionate about (RTS for me at the time) I'm not sure I'd be a web developer today. I think these kinds of a programs are a great first steps to get kids excited about the web and/or basic languages before middle school and high school classes (in our out of class schedule) provide more thorough or complex introductions to programming proper.

98 points by Furzel 12y ago

Quick summary : The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher. For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers. Personal opinion : While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).

aikah 12y ago
In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, yet the government want pupils to learn programming ? same old french bullshit. Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody. That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a few hands and a total distrust of institutions.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- fzltrp 12y ago
  > In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, Define basic teaching. > a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, Reference?
- mousa 12y ago
  I fail to see how the French kids' ability to write would be hurt by their being introduced to programming. Maybe you think the solution to their not being able to write is to sacrifice all other subjects to focus on writing. Though I doubt the writing is that bad, if it's the case I'd probably axe history before programming.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  > a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool Maybe it's time to simplify the French language. After all, we get along just fine in English without l'imparfait du subjonctif.
mackwic 12y ago
In the short run, I agree to say that the formation will be very bad and could turn teenagers out of the code with bad experiences, which is a shame. However in the long run, with IT being more and more present, and the global pool of users being more and more mature, I think that's a good thing which will open great perspectives to our teenagers. Moreover the educational program can be adapted with the feedback of the field. We shouldn't spit in the soup, this is a good measure.
bpatrianakos 12y ago
What is it a step forward for? A popular opinion on HN seems to be that programming should be taught in schools because it's somehow a new basic skill everyone should have? I have to disagree and don't see it being a step forward for anything. Programming after hours, taught as a kind of extracurricular activity seems sufficient to me. There's no need to know how to program a computer. Knowing how to use a computer is the important skill. You don't need to know how to rebuild a transmission to drive a car in the same way you don't need to know how to build a web page to know how to input text into form fields and click a submit button. Those who are curious and interested will learn to build the things we use while others will find it more than enough to simply to know how to use the things the rest of us have built. I, like anyone else here, am super passionate about programming and it thrills me to be able to make a computer do my bidding but my friends and family don't care how the computer works. That's okay. I know a carpenter. I love living in a well built home but don't really care to know how to build one. Knowing how to work a stud finder to hang a painting is enough for me.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot. We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs. The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.

roma1n 12y ago

It should be noted that France had a nice, Papert-style "programming" curriculum centered on Logo in the eighties. Specific computers (hey, it's France) were developed, such as the Thomson TO7. And then... Nothing.

mackwic 12y ago
You forgot OCaml, our national pride ! Our CS researcher have a large expertise in proofs and static analysis with Coq, Coccinelle and the like.
- aikah 12y ago
  yep, and TurboPascal and Delphi ,then I moved abroad to study and I didnt even know C ...
agumonkey 12y ago
I was part of that generation. IIRC most kids didn't give a damn about it. At that age everything is just a weird random novelty. It was exciting for the device though, TO7 and lightpen were cute. Beside in the 80s, computers weren't a thing, even video games were barely established at home. And LOGO didn't feel like programming, turtling was felt more about geometry (left is down if facing left) than anything else, at least to me. We didn't really go into iterations and such. I hope the new effort will use books like Code http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Software/dp/0735611319 http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa... or something similar that don't take a macbook air for granted but instead use down to earth first principles that can be shown, built and tested with kids hands. For slightly older kids, wishing for HtDP inspired classes.

tenfingers 12y ago

In Italy I had the first programming introduction at 11, using Commodore 64 and the language used for teaching was Logo. Logo had to be loaded from 5" floppy disks. Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year), we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead. Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing during these classes). Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with programming at all. At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms, while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot. The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split in two parts: * basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle") * applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle Nothing much learned in these classes, if anything actually. I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I only have shitty memories about these times. Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear, especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids anything. In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have. You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system.

Furzel 12y ago
I totally get your point, when your passionate about something, as a student you need someone really good to teach you. And thus the issue when non passionate teachers ends up teaching something because they have to and not because they like it. In the end I believe the point of CS lectures at such a young age is not to actually teach people programming but more let them know that this field exist, how it basically works and light the spark for some students. I've seen a lot of people when I was in engineering school going 'Ho my god I wish I had knew about CS before, would have saved me a lot of time' ( And some going the other way ). Having these kind of revelation 10 years before can only be something positive .

guylhem 12y ago

As a kid in France (in the late eighties, quite young, but I can't remember when precisely), I had some "programming classes", using Logo on Thomson computers - http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this day. I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting thing was that it allowed experimenting. Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the interpretation, ie BUGS!!! What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.

GuiA 12y ago

According to other sources, it seems like what will be taught is HTML: http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-html-propose-en-primaire-des-la-rentree/ http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-h... The posted article also points out that the classes will be "périscolaire", i.e. outside of regular class hours. This means that the teachers who teach those courses will have to stay late. Only the super-committed teachers will volunteer to do that - and it's not a given that there will be such a teacher in every school. And even when there is, remember that the French school day typically finishes at 4.30p. The teacher will have to attempt teaching a group of exhausted pre-teens who just want to go home. Additionally, again as mentioned in the article, almost a third of schools (16 000 out of 54 000) in France don't have access to high speed internet - and many, many students from the lower social groups may not have internet/computers at home. The government says that in September, half of these 16k schools will magically get high speed internet access through radio links. If history teaches us anything, those 9k schools certainly won't all get working internet overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if most schools still won't really have a functional internet by September 2015. And internet is not everything either- those schools (mostly rural and/or underfunded districts) are also very likely to have just a few, outdated computers for the whole school, without a budget to address that. As someone with a graduate degree in computer science, extensive experience teaching CS/programming to kids/teenagers/adults, and an avid follower of work done by Piaget, Papert, Abelson, etc., I'm absolutely all for exposing children to computational ideas early, and using them to support and enhance learning. I've taught many such classes with kids 6-12 myself, and it can be done very successfully- even with kids who are not that interested in the first place. Unfortunately here, it seems like it's a reactionary measure taken by our government to not be behind similar initiatives in the US and other countries, without much thought given into it. The fact that it is called "apprentissage du code informatique" rather than "apprentissage de la programmation" (or even "apprentissage de l'informatique") is not ideal either; the first thing that I associate it to is "apprentissage du code de la route" (classes that teach the laws behind driving, which you have to take before your driver's license in France), an association that I am sure many non-tech savvy parents or teachers will make in some way. With the taste French government has for putting certifications and "brevets" on everything, this is going to get silly quite fast (I remember the B2i I had to take in middle school, a "certificate" for internet & computers that we obtained after being taught what was essentially an internet explorer class by a shop teacher who was way out of his depth). Interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ministre de l'Éducation is merging effective, proven 2-year university diplomas that produce high quality computer technicians (who can then easily take on a computer engineering/computer science degree) with tangentially related electronic engineering ones, just to save money: http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-et-reseaux-pour-l-industrie-et-les-services http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-.... Things like the latter will definitely hurt France's ability to compete on the international tech scene. On the other hand, I'm not sure teaching HTML after class hours in schools were teachers are already overworked and lacking critical resources will do much.

LukeB_UK 12y ago

As of September, programming is a mandatory part of the curriculum in UK schools.

igravious 12y ago
I did not know that. Go UK :) After a little digging here is an outline of the curriculum. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...
- MarcScott 12y ago
  Here's a better guide that teachers will be using to guide student learning. http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/original.pdf http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/origina...

nawitus 12y ago

Finland will[1] something similar. Programming will be taught from the first grade upwards, but the few first grades will use teaching methods like Computer Science Unplugged[2]. 1. http://koodi2016.fi/ http://koodi2016.fi/ 2. http://csunplugged.org/ http://csunplugged.org/

pling 12y ago

They're teaching my daughter python here in the UK at age 10. I got taught BASIC (BBC BASIC) and some ARM assembler [1] in 1992 at school in maths. [1] ARM assembler because our maths teacher was moonlighting selling RISCOS software and was quite helpful.

sfermigier 12y ago

That's terrific news. The official word used is "coding", not "programming", which leaves a slightly bad aftertaste. Anyway, there is already an option for the scientific students in the last year of high school, the so called "Computer and digital science" (https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-informatique-et-sciences-du-numerique-en-terminale-s https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-inform...).

hayd 12y ago

Haskell.

tonfa 12y ago

Could someone fix the title? There is nothing about enforcing, this won't be mandatory (and may not even be available in all schools).

dang 12y ago
We've attempted to.

mknits 12y ago

Don't force, please. Period.

thrush 12y ago

Google Translated to English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fsociete%2Farticle%2F2014%2F07%2F13%2Fl-apprentissage-du-code-informatique-sera-propose-au-primaire-en-septembre_4456197_3224.html&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

dang 12y ago
Thanks. Hacker News is an English-language site. This is not to disparage content in other languages; it's just what the site is. Posts not in English will mostly be demoted, unless they're of major significance and not available in translation.

olivierlacan 12y ago

I learned basic electric circuitry in primary school in basically the same context (extra-curricular activity the hour after regular classes end, once a week) and it was great. We learned how to solder stuff on circuit boards (yes, soldering irons, yes some kids burned themselves, big whoop), how to use glue guns (again, I burned myself a bit, nothing serious) to put components together when assembling basic machines. Can you even imagine the kind of amazing physical computing kids could be doing with Arduino and Raspberry Pi these days. HTML & CSS seem like a no brainer. I learned those in a "Technology" (in regular class hours) during my last year of middle school (again, in Paris). If it weren't for a sympathetic instructor who told us to do make a website using FrontPage on anything we were passionate about (RTS for me at the time) I'm not sure I'd be a web developer today. I think these kinds of a programs are a great first steps to get kids excited about the web and/or basic languages before middle school and high school classes (in our out of class schedule) provide more thorough or complex introductions to programming proper.