Schools computing 'revolution' stalls - BBC News

[elsiegee40]

Computing GCSE 'leaves girls and poorer students behind' - BBC News

[Dos_Box]

Interesting, it does seem to point to the fact that it is seen as hard rather than an unattractive course.

I'm not sure of the exact course content but if anyone here can post up details of what the course entials it would be very helpful.

It also points out that it is still early days and recalling very early threads on EduGeek many members were quite critical of the old ICT GCSE due to it's heavy Office focus.

I (being 'old) did the old Computer Science GCE back in the early 80's which was pretty much programming focussed and was quite popular.

Hopefully the new course will find its feet.

[mavhc]

The problem still starts when kids at 0 days old, with adults treating girls and boys differently. By 3 or 4 they already think stereotypes are true, that princesses should be rescued and boys are better at, in my niece's case, riding bikes. That's only going to change very slowly, everyone needs to work harder at counteracting stereotypes.

 

Next issue: Teachers, can't just suddenly invent a new subject and have teachers magically appear. I ended up volunteering to teach the 4 pupils who wanted to do it in my school for GCSE. Hopefully they find my knowledge of how these concepts work in real life, and the history of why things are like they are, useful.

 

If they're being taught programming at every year, in 5 years or so the ones taking GCSE will be much better equipped to start the course.

 

The 2016 course dropped a lot of the interesting parts though, for Edexcel, no mention of unicode, no practical SQL, no MAC addresses, VPNs, Assembly language, Overflow, HTML, CSS.

 

It was a really packed course, but dropping SQL/HTML/CSS seems short sighted, that's what everyone uses.