Unix courses

[dhicks]

By the above guide someone who applies with AAA in Maths, Economics and Physics is much more likely to get admitted then someone with AAA in Accounting, Business Studies and ICT and I hope students realise this when they are choosing their courses.

Which is 100% absolutely correct and how it should be - A-level ICT is for people who'll be using ICT in their future jobs (i.e. most everyone), software development (which most computer science graduates are going to go on to) is an academic discipline that requires a whole bunch of assorted skills to succeed at, maths and interpersonal interactions being foremost. If you want to go do computer science do maths, yet more maths, applied maths and maybe a language so you can talk to foreign mathematicians.

--
David Hicks

[dhicks]

GUI's are something to run your web browser in.

Yep, that about sums it up.

If you want to teach kids something about computer that they would find useful and help in their degrees/future employement then it's got to be AJAX/Web 2.0/Javascript/XHTML/etc.

I'd aim to keep "software development" taught at degree level - programming is dead easy, but software development is the rather dull, tedious process of taking a user's requirements and expectations and creating a piece of software out of them. Programming (i.e. identifying and laying out algorithms for execution by a computer) is just another skill that all schools pupils should learn, like mind-mapping or times tables. The job of the ICT teacher should simply be to encourage exploration around computing technology and programming, not to turn 16-year-olds away from computing by boring them with stuff like user requirements at such a tender age.

--
David Hicks

[ajtaylor]

If you want to go do computer science do maths, yet more maths, applied maths and maybe a language so you can talk to foreign mathematicians.

One of the biggest gaps in most people's education/skills is the ability to solve problems rationally and consistently, which is, IMHO, essential for any computing related work. Fortunately, it's something that can be taught, but I've not encountered any schools that do - they might teach what they call problem solving, usual maths related, but rarely do they teach practical problem solving.