Computing Skills - Take 2

[brong]

So cuddlefairy asked last week - "what do you think are the 5 most important computing skills for a child to coming out of school".

After a bunch of discussion in that thread, and at home, and at camp... here's the revised list as decided by me. Usual disclaimers apply.

• How Computers Work - how to switch them on and off. That cables need to be plugged in

Comments

[pyrrha17]

Sure, and I'm sure you had home support (well, you had those books, and probably a computer at home) and educated parents. Not all kids have that.

I'm sure experts in every field would like kids to come out of primary school knowing how to do things they consider basics. Being introduced to them and seeing them are one thing, having them as skills is quite another. I'm a maths/physics major and y'know, I'd really like the vast majority of kids to come out of primary school being able to do long division and being able to add basic fractions and multiply two three-digit numbers together. Just because I knew about exponentials, pythagoras and could quote the Fibonacci sequence to many numbers in grade six doesn't mean that everyone should have those skills. Reality says that most kids can't do those basics I mentioned in grade six, they just grab the calculator.

And, out of interest, who are you expecting to teach programming in primary schools? The primary teachers, who, on average are female and over forty - no stereotypes, but do you think most of them understand programming? Secondary schools are having huge problems teaching IT (let alone having actual IT teachers in primary schools) as they don't have specialist teachers teaching the subject. I was employed as a maths teacher and was teaching IT. Fine for me, I'm computer literate (enough), not so for the other class that had an art teacher teaching it, and she was out of her depth with the year seven curriculum. This argument now enters the topic of teacher pay - you can't get enough specialist teachers when the pay in industry is so much better.

Reality: there are many important skills for kids to come out of primary school with. The teachers are human and can only teach so much. Leave programming for a (hopefully) specialist in High school.

[brong]

Teacher training is a whole side issue that we could spend a while down. I'm going to armwave over most of it with "the same applies for any new thing - you're going to have a chicken and egg issue". Regardless, computers _will_ be in schools, and teachers will have to teach stuff they don't know very well at first. What specifically that is - well...

programming is hard in very much the same way that writing is hard. If you disagree with me then feel free to present your own finished JK Rowling / Dan Brown competitor novel any time you like. It also has a similar producers/consumers ratio. It only takes one JK Rowling to produce millions of identical Harry Potter books, and it only takes a few programmers to build a piece of software that millions of people can use. Most people won't be writing big pieces of software for a living.

What they probably _will_ be doing (if they don't get some exposure to programming back when they're willing to learn) is sitting there laboriously copy'n'pasting or even re-data-entering stuff that is already in the computer but not quite in the format they want. They'll be sitting there with a desk calculator adding up values to hand enter into a spreadsheet cell.

Interestingly, games are making a big push in this area. Games like Eve Online where you can actually design your own objects in a runtime-safe programming language that interact with the world around them. I see this trend growing with new games that come out, but even the earliest Quake games were scriptable to quite an amazing degree, and people who wanted to play well were willing to learn a bit of programming to help them along.

Richard's comments on this today were similar. One of the best ways to teach many of these concepts is to find compelling games that the kids will want to play, and that teach the skills you are pushing as a side-effect.

[traeemery]

When I think about kids coming out of primary school, I think of kids who can read a newspaper with near fluency, write essays of up to 300 words, been exposed to another language, have the basics of history (world and country), geography, social studies, sciences and maths skills which will allow them to calculate correct change, deal with fractions, and do long multiplication and division.
I realise that this does not actually reflect the popluation of students finishing primary school today. However, it was the standard when I left (my public, country primary school). I may have been top of my class, but even the bottom of the class could do those things.
Given it's 20yrs on from that, I think that computer knowledge is much more important now. We were all taught basic computer programming concepts in our one computer lab for 2 hrs for 2 terms by the librarian who had skilled up. Why is it so hard to do now? (I'm honestly asking. I really don't understand what has changed that primary education 20 years on is now so difficult to get the basics across.)