Wednesday 13 April 2011

Computing in schools

Today I was browsing the internet and it was brought to my attention that we learn so little about computing in England in secondary school. In my experience the most advance thing I done in school was some formulas in Microsoft excel. Our school had two IT teachers and one I would say new a fair bit about computing while the other who was my teacher probably did not know how a computer functions. You always hear that the future is full of computing well I believe the curriculum in schools needs to be changed, It should teach children the fundamentals of how a computer works. Learn about networks and the internet. Learn about the different components in a computer. Also learn two programming languages such as C and Python. Then you can opt to do extra such as web development, more software development or networking at GCSE level. At the moment you learn basically the basics of Microsoft office in 5 years. This could be taught in the last year of primary school.

What are your thoughts on the current IT curriculum being taught to children in your country ?
(Please state your country in the comment with your answer) 

8 comments:

  1. Its pretty much the same as in your country. IT education sucks and is pretty much limited to MS Office.

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  2. Hardware I'll disagree on. Basic Java and C/C++/C# should be required as available to take as a class IMO.

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  3. american education is different from english, they attend uni and a younger age, usually 16.

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  4. I'm from the USA but American Education is a scam based on student loans. Thanks for the informative post though :)

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  5. Netherlands here. I had the opportunity to choose a course 'informatica' which was something like IT education. But it wasnt really programming, it was more building websites, opening and replacing stuff inside a computer.

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  6. MA, USA.

    American highschools teach a typing course around here, but that's about it. They should have a basic software and hardware course imo.

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  7. I never had any kind of computing course in high school. Would have been much more useful than most of the classes I took.

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  8. im actually not sure. I don't think we have any.... if we do, i think they start in highschool and are a choice to be taken or not.

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