BBC News - Should children learn how computers work?

Well, it's certainly a busy day for educational IT in the news today!
This is an audio interview so you might want to don headphones :)

BBC News - Today - Should kids learn how computers work?

Yes, personally, I think they should.

Rather than just doing death by Powerpoint or 'bouncing ball' flash animations, I think they should learn the basics of how a PC/Laptop/Tablet work.

The only problem I can see would be the teachers keeping up to date with changes in technology which, if I am honest, they don't seem very good at doing now and they only seem to teach very low-level stuff!

Andrew

I thought they already "learnt" this by nicking the hard drives and RAM from them and re-arranging the letters on keyboards to various colourful words...

I dont think there's actually much point in teaching pupils how computers work in terms of Hard drives,RAM, CPU's,etc. If anything it would probably be more useful explaining to them how the internet/websites/email etc work rather than the physical hardware.

Mind you there are probably more useful life-skills which would prepare kids better than teaching them technical theory which they could get from a book if they were interested!