Sunday, April 13, 2008
Computing & ICT
Back to my roots on this one. There was an article in the paper yesterday and another on the radio on Thursday about difficulties in getting people to take computer science courses and taking up posts as programmers, etc. The claim was made that not enough programming is done in schools and that there is far too much focus on ICT skills such as word processing, etc. Software development has always been my favourite bit of any computing curriculum and one of the main things that makes computing a worthwhile area of study worthy of undertaking in school. A lot of skills based ICT courses are actually incredibly dull because they focus on learning a set of skills for a particular software package such as MS Office. That package will almost definitely be out of date by the time the young people actually need to use the skills in the real world. Software development is about problem solving, analytical thinking, creativity and so much more. When it is taught well it can be exciting and highly fulfilling. It feels a little bit like the debate between a highly utilitarian view of education and one which focusses on learning for life. It is certainly worthy of debate as the technology outcomes for curriculum for excellence are published tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hi,
I agree entirely, and especially with the "creativity" part. I teach Computing, and I feel for the students at times, because we give them this machine with unlimited possibility then ask them to type words in, make them bold and save it as EX3.
As i've just ranted here, I don't think the solution lies in the downgrading of computing to a subject based around programming, because there's so much that can be done with programming, and it's such a loose concept, that it could be presented in many different ways.
we should ask "what do computer experts do?" and "what can be done with computers" and answer the questions with whatever packages create the most useful and exciting things. We already have many many many skills courses for Computing, and for that reason we don't really -need- to teach office skills.
Would be nice to have pupils want to learn how to do things. This is what happens when I try teaching game making. Not so much with the spreadsheets, though - so far no minds have been blown by the SUM function :/
Spot on. The enquiry skills that children could gain from learning to program would more than outweight the skills they can gain from using an office package. I teach in upper stages primary, and spend a lot of time looking at MS software (or stripped down equivalents thereof). For able children though, finding a challenge in creating a presentation, poster, or whatever, is increasingly difficult.
Obviously, in primary school we're in a position where we can easily use other curricular areas to teach about using office applications - spreadsheets in maths, or word processors/publisher in language. Because of that, our scheduled ICT slots ought to contain some nod towards programming (beyond the use of roamer robots) and learn some useful programming skills, for example, some basic html that they can use to publish their work on the web themselves.
I'm always really impressed with how able my pupils are with their computers, and frankly, often amazed by them. There's no reason at all why they shouldn't be pushed to get even the basics at the stage they're at.
Post a Comment