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

[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.