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]

Logo probably. BASIC:

10 PRINT "I am the best"
20 GOTO 10

or as Richard here at work suggested:

10 PRINT "What is your name?"
20 READ A
30 PRINT "What do you like doing?"
40 READ B
50 PRINT "Sorry $A you're never going to get to $B"
60 GOTO 50

(excuse my bogus BASIC skills)

[catsidhe]

You'd prefer Python and it's syntactically meaningful whitespace, would you? Bah! Give me Perl any day!

LISP might be considered too rarified for littlies, although it will drill home some fundamental concepts.

There's always INTERCAL...

[pyrrha17]

Programming - bullshit. Get out of your ideal world and into the real one

[traeemery]

If we are talking about primary school, I'm siding with brong on this one. Younger kids take to it much better than high school kids. In fact there are lots of programs out there specifically designed to teach kids programing concepts which are language indepentant.
When I was in primary school, I had a series of books which was like The Hardy Boys but these brothers used Basic programs to help them solve mysteries.
All programing is about logic, why not expect primary school kids to be able to deal with basic logic?

[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

[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

[asmodel]

I'm not going to enter into the 'to teach or not to teach programming' debate:) I read the last thread and several people commented on the need for spreadsheet or database skills. I'm going to bring that up again, and if programming is going to stay at number 5, I suggest having 6 essential skills, and making data analysis the 6th. This would involve being able to put data into spreadsheets and database, and either lay it out in a table, or create a graph. Given that primary school children are now taught data collation and graphs in school, I think it makes perfect sense to continue this to putting it in electronic format.

I'd say this is more important than programming, as we live in an age with a lot of data, and the ability to process it (especially given pezzae's thread on younger children not being able to analyse data) is essentail. In the context of using it in high school, I found it handy to make table summaries of what I'd learnt, and did a lot of my maths and science work on spreadsheets

[daharja]

Five computer skills:

1. - How to turn the bloody thing off. At the wall.
2. - CTRL-ALT-DEL. And see 1 when things get really bad.
3. - How to look like you're working when the boos comes around, and switch screens quickly from the web browser to the word processor.
4. - How to suck coffee/tea/vodka out of the keyboard without breaking it.
5. - Learning that 90% of users have passwords such as 'password' or '[insert husband's name/child's name/pet's name + minimal numbers to bring it up to required field size]'

Yeah, that'd be right. Oh, and for avoiding most viruses, how to buy a Mac instead of a Windows piece of shit.

[daharja]

boos => boss.

hehe

[brong]

Boooooooos. Sounds about right.