This is kind of connected with the "Oftsted/ICT Poor" thread. The IT teaching staff were in a huddle this morning discussing this and wondering what programming language to teach. Would be interested to know what you people do...? I've included a few choices from the Tiobe index, but maybe that's not relevant here...?
Perl or bash
Officially: Scratch / Smalltalk (yes, really).
Unofficially: whatever the kid's interested in at a lunchtime club. But that's a very unofficial setup. You don't talk about unofficial lunchtine club because you might attract lackwits. Kids with aptitude find out about it on the grapevine.
Also, where's Perl?
Our staff teach the kids how to program in Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and Medi8tor here. What? They are programming languages! STFU, they ARE programming languages! They aren't? Well that's not what the staff have told me.
We don't, and I wouldn't class PHP as a programming language - but VB is a good start, certainly. I'm looking into rolling up the tools to deploy Visual Studio for students at the moment.
Why not?Originally Posted by 3s-gtech
Can't see why not?
huh. PHP is way more useful than VB in the real world.
Think of how many people who use VB and move onto PHP (lots) compared to people to move from PHP to VB.
What seems to be lacking in schools when teaching programming is any real focus on programming methodology & system design. The choice of language is largely irrelevant once you have mastered these skills, although you have to be able to select the appropriate language for the task in hand. Programming languages come & go as technology & fashion move forward, but the basics don't change.
Dont teach any programming here and with current staff we wont be anytime soon.
Isnt it strange that early on GCSE in IT was learning programming (I could be wrong) but now its how to be a user.
That was a fudge. I guess it's because it's a server side scripting language - I see programming as creating something, compiling it, client side. Obviously PHP should be taught - but we seem to do so much with web development already that it almost seems like missing a trick there - PHP could be properly integrated into web development; with programming lessons embracing another language.
PHP is easy to learn, and can demonstrate both basic and more advanced 'programming' concepts (including objects), while being useful as well. Not that other languages can't do that - they can - but PHP shouldn't be discounted just because it's classed primarily as a 'scripting' language.
I agree with broc and he makes a very valid point. I also believe that students will enjoy it more if it's relevant and useful at the time.
php doesn't need to be server side, or even solely for web devm - that's just its widest use. You can create traditional gui application with QT and php if you really wanted to.
As well as PHP-GTK and WinBinder for Windows.
Everyone should be taught Ruby and then Ruby on Rails.
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