Linked by David Adams on Sun 8th May 2011 04:15 UTC
Well-known game developer David Braben is a little bit fed up with the state of computer science education these days, which seems to have shifted away from learning programming to some sort of computer-oriented "life skills" class. As the father of eleven and nine year-old boys, I can attest that so far, despite a massive investment on the part of their school in computer equipment, their computer education has consisted mostly of "play this math game" and "don't be victimized by cyber-perverts." Braben's idea to stem this tide: a very, very cheap computer that students can learn to program on.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
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2010-03-15
Hi all,
This is an interesting discussion Scope brings up and I had to ponder it myself a little too - as maybe I only think that programming should be taught in schools as I'm a coder myself.
But I think that programming, at least the basics of it, is a useful for people in this IT saturated world to understand how best to work with computers and that they are still just dumb machines! Also, planning algorithms and breaking down problems to basic steps should have some benifits in other fields - I'm sure that sometimes my analytical knowledge is useful in other domains (ok, maybe not always so helpful in other domains - relationship advice, etc!), or at least can bring another PoV into account.
Anyway, I was happy with my 80-90s Computing at school, we did a little BBC Basic programming at primary, some Turtle graphics and at secondary did some good stuff (loops, functions, conditional statements, working with files, etc...) with a Scotland only language called COMAL (just an advanced BASIC for DOS) and a little HTML. We did the word-processing, spreadsheet stuff too which I did find really dull! but we also did traversing DOS file-system and basics of the fetch-execute cycle which was great. Basically as I was doing hobbist stuff at home as well I found my BEng Computing degree a doddle in first year.
Cheers,
Chris.