Article: The BBC Micro 2 - Look what's coming back to the classroom

[trevj]

Thanks for sharing this. I hope it proves to be a successful legacy project.

[Dos_Box]

There was a discussion about this on Twitter today with raspberry_pi claiming it was a hoax. They retracted their comment and apologised.

Gareth

There is more information on what happened here: BBC confirms new computing in schools programme | bit-tech.net and it was all a bit of a misunderstanding.

[somabc]

OMG this song! Audioboo / Hack Rap

[ZeroHour]

@ZeroHour have you seen the raspberry pi project?

Yep
We host Frambozenbiers forums (Frambozenbier: RasPi Forums) as well. Frambozenbier are not Raspberry Pi Foundation FYI just a website dedicated to working with the Pi's

Wow I go and have a baby and all that kicks up LOL.

[petectid]

Correct me if I'm wrong but can't coding be taught in schools without making any expenditure on new hardware and software. Isn't there a danger of money being wasted, as it often has in the past with expensive resources and hardware. I see that any investment in the change in curriculum would be better spent on training the teachers to deliver it.

[GrumbleDook]

Catch 22 really ... to teach coding in schools you tend to need coding environments. This either means time to set them up, get access to them on the web or to bring in kit to help do it. With things like Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc it can simplify a lot of the work, especially when there is a ready community all helping to share resources and ideas. I small amount of expenditure to introduce open environments, make a move towards more open source offerings ... it can reap savings in years to come if planned right.

[petectid]

Yes Tony as usual you make alot of sense. The worrying side of all this is that if schools are given an overwelming choice of resources this will only go a long way to complicating what should be a simple process. I'm of the opinion that to teach programming in schools we should probably state that the language taught should be a cross platform and object orientated. Whether that means the compiled code has to be usable on muliple platforms or recompiled/modified to run on another. A language like Java would be cheap to use in schools as the JDK is free and can be installed on the workstations if not already. The coding could be typed into a simple text editor like notepad, textedit or kate. The skills used in using most OO languages are transferable to other OO languages. The only drawback with the simple text editor route is that you would have to give your pupils access to the Command line to compile it. I think this would be still easier than using an IDE package like Eclipse.

[Dos_Box]

The other big question is dependant on what IT course the schools do. I know there are a few course being worked on, but what languages and resources they require is still a bit of a mystery.
If any of the companies working on the new ICT curriculum courses are reading this and would care to post to give us all an idea of what to expect it would be very helpful.

[jinnantonnixx]

This made me smile.

dinosaurcomics.png


The "Invent with Python" Blog — Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program

[mavhc]

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since this article was posted, for me