USB Stick PC for $25
Linked by David Adams on Sun 8th May 2011 04:15 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems 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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RE: It gets worse...
by renox on Mon 9th May 2011 08:55 UTC in reply to "It gets worse..."
renox
Member since:
2005-07-06

When I was in High School, a good decade+ ago, Computer Science was learning the basics c & c++. The following year, because only a few were able to understand that, it was diminished to html. The year after that, it was typing in word, because teachers couldn't grasp the concepts well enough to be effective. That is the core of the issue. Unskilled teachers.


For programming, I'm not so sure that it is only a teacher issue: once a (new) teacher asked me to do a test he was creating to see if the test was ok or not for the (first year) students.
I finished the test in 30 minutes (the examination was supposed to take 3h) so I thought that the test was ok, but it turned out that most of the student failed and he was criticized by other teachers because they thought that the test was too difficult..

Programming takes a special mindset, I'm not sure that it is for everybody.

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