BBC Click - Can a £15 computer solve the programming gap?

[JJonas]

BBC Click did a piece this week about teaching kids in the classroom to program rather than use Word.

 

BBC News - Can a £15 computer solve the programming gap?

[pcstru]

Can a £15 computer solve the programming gap?

 

No. Something like the £1.50 PicAxe 08 has been around for many years. You do need other bits to be able to program it, including a PC, but it is simple, cheap, and actually engaging to kids; yet it is ignored in the curriculum. Other articles mention the simplicity of yesterdays computers as being part of the key (suggesting perhaps that the complexity of todays PC's are a barrier) - yet there are more tools round now, certainly plenty of free, accessible programming languages - but they are not taught in schools.

 

The thing that will solve the programming gap is to actually TEACH programming. It doesn't matter much what the platform is, what matters is spending time, energy, enthusiasm and expertise actually TEACHING programming as a discipline.

[penfold]

Quite interesting, although a lot of the things on there have been said on here numerous times. And one line which stood out was "this teacher has ignored the national curriculum"...how long can they do that for? If the school get poor grades because they dont learn the national curriculum it wont be very long until they revert back to the national curriculum. Unfortunately at the moment most teaching computing isn't computing, it's office/admin skills. How often do any of us perform a mail merge or a flyer because it's in our JD?

 

I dont think any new device will change the availability to teach programming as I dont think it is a technical problem(as you have facilities to teach it now). To do that you will need to change the curriculum and ensure you have staff with the skills to teach it. And I would take a quess that with the current teachers qualifications it wouldn't be possible to change it to include programming without significant training provided. This isn't a bash at teachers, just an opinion that either people have either never learnt any programming or have forgotten most of what they did know. And looking at all the cuts by the government, I dont see there being any money to force through such changes, although I would like to be wrong and more "computer skills" to be taught in schools.

[dhicks]

either people have either never learnt any programming or have forgotten most of what they did know

 

There's the problem - the perception that programming is actually difficult, or that you need to memorise a bunch of stuff to be able to program a computer. Programming isn't difficult, you just need to get the general idea, any details you can look up as you go along. You don't need to change the national curriculum, you just need to teach bits of it as exercises for which writing a computer program might be one way to find a solution.

[CyberNerd]

It won't help teaching programming because most IT Teachers don't even know the first thing about programming. If they did they would get proper jobs.

[pcstru]

It won't help teaching programming because most IT Teachers don't even know the first thing about programming. If they did they would get proper jobs.

 

The needle on my Troll-O-Meter just broke the glass and flew out of the window. There's only smoke coming from the poor blackened sizzled remains.

[penfold]

There's the problem - the perception that programming is actually difficult, or that you need to memorise a bunch of stuff to be able to program a computer. Programming isn't difficult, you just need to get the general idea, any details you can look up as you go along. You don't need to change the national curriculum, you just need to teach bits of it as exercises for which writing a computer program might be one way to find a solution.

 

I agree especially at the level they are talking about in schools. I learnt programming through Pascal and did it for years. Now while I never actually used it in my work, I did use the theory that I was taught. The construction of a language and good programming techniques and whilst I admit I dont actually like to program, it has helped that I have been able to cobble together scripts (admittidly lots of which are from here) which make my job easier because I can understand what they do and adapt what I have to fit. However from my experience of the amount of training that was required when Moodle was introduced, I cant imagine too many staff would be willing to teach programming without additional training simply because they fear it will be difficult to do.

[Gibbo]

Already discussed last month here:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/75177-tiny-pc-schools.html

[SYNACK]

The needle on my Troll-O-Meter just broke the glass and flew out of the window. There's only smoke coming from the poor blackened sizzled remains.

 

The same thing just happened to my sad but true-o-meter there must have been some labeling confusion somewhere

[jinnantonnixx]

I watched Click last night; David Braben was scathing of ICT, referring to it as 'typing'.

 

I'd definitely buy this kit, it reminds me of the hobbyist days of the early '80s. The nearest thing I've bought to that is the NSLU2 micro Linux box. I changed the firmware to OpenSlug and got it running as a primitive web+media server. It had no graphic output, though, it was all through SSH.

[mats]

I'd like to see Arduino in secondaries - programmed in c-like language, loads of libraries and help out there and it's about £12 per board, no software or licencing cost. Plenty of interface boards or you can make your own.

[SteveBentley]

We learned to program on 80s 8-bit machines because that was the way they worked and the only way to get them to do cool stuff. When you turned it on you got a command prompt and you'd experiment and type something random in and see what happened. Your mate at schools showed you the good old

 

10 PRINT "STEVE IS COOL"

20 GOTO 10

 

trick. You'd buy a magazine with the complete source listing of a game, spend hours typing it in and start to notice the patterns like FOR loops, IF statements, the brackets around functions. Hell the Spectrum even had those commands printed on the key tops.

 

We learned to program 80s computers because that's how they worked, and that was how you scratched an itch back then.

 

Nowadays the average user doesn't care what a for loop is, nor do they need to. The GUI hides all of the fun and interesting stuff from them. For all they've got a lot more advanced, computers are a lot more boring nowadays.

[dhicks]

For all they've got a lot more advanced, computers are a lot more boring nowadays.

 

But JavaScript in web pages are a perfectly good way to start programming - they need no resources, work on pretty much every platform (including phones) and the code-compile-test cycle consists of saving your file and hitting "refresh" in the browser.

 

What might be interesting to try with the above device is a build-your-own-computer club. It would be easy enough for children to do a spot of CAD to create their own Commodore 64-style all-in-one case complete with keyboard ready to plug in to a home TV. You could use an Atom motherboard if you wanted - everything all on-board, nothing really to go wrong, maybe just soldering a power switch.

[SkywOrca]

Pish, who needs to do all that long-winded CAD stuff? Just get one of these and away you go! Of course, the price tag might put off the average school computer club.

[SYNACK]

But JavaScript in web pages are a perfectly good way to start programming - they need no resources, work on pretty much every platform (including phones) and the code-compile-test cycle consists of saving your file and hitting "refresh" in the browser.

 

Perfectly good but not quite as easy as print "your text here". It has also been around for literally a decade without being picked up by the teachig community at large unfourtunatly. With javascript you really have to have an HTML page with a control to write into and so a lot of the simplicity is lost when you have to tack in the complexity and possible errors that could be created by a simple character switch on your event handler or document markup. Even if you prebuild the document they loose a lot of the sence of achivement from doing it themselves as a chunk has been preprepared. You just loose some of that simplicity when you have to introduce maths looking stuff for the most basic (pun intended) of tasks.

 

bring back qbasic

Edited June 6, 2011 by SYNACK

[elsiegee40]

Programming isn't difficult, but it does require a certain logic in thought processes which I, and I suspect many edugeeks, have. Many do not and training anyone to think that way is not straightforward... without it you end up with spaghetti code...

 

Former mainframe programmers may remember the Pansophic code generator. It was ace at spaghetti code; the programs it produced were monsters. the insurance company that I worked for reverted to people doing all the coding pretty quickly when we proved that our code was much more manageable!

[SteveBentley]

But JavaScript in web pages are a perfectly good way to start programming

 

Oh yeah, but do people have the motivation to want to do that?

[unixman]

We have flowol installed and there have been attempts to get students to program with it. I've witnessed one class and none of students managed to complete even the simplest task. Is this a result of bad teaching or overly complicated software? I think the latter. I was a programmer for 20 years and while I could see what flowol was supposed to do, I found it far to complicated to drive. At my previous school, we used tried to use blassic in programming class and the students couldn't cope with it at all. People today as too used to seeing a GUI and when they learn to program, want to see a pretty interface; blassic is pure command line. There was more success with logo.

 

When I was in high school we had a computer club and we learned to program in basic on a machine at the local university. Computer club was invitation only and it remains a mystery as to why I was invited. I wasn't the most mathematically inclined student. The programs we wrote were very simple; print your name on the screen etc. It wasn't until I was at uni that I realised how difficult programming can be.

 

Three years ago, I received some blurb about a programming competition which was run especially for UK students. I asked the ICT teachers if any of the students might enter; they said said it would be a waste of time as the students were too thick. I wish I could remember which competition is was. There are schools that have success in programming competitions. I found this one Animation11: UK Schools Computer Animation Competition (School of Computer Science - The University of Manchester)

[jinnantonnixx]

At the risk of veering off-topic, BlueJ and Greenfoot might be worth a look for more advanced students.

 

BlueJ - Teaching Java - Learning Java

 

greenfoot.org

[pcstru]

But JavaScript in web pages are a perfectly good way to start programming - they need no resources, work on pretty much every platform (including phones) and the code-compile-test cycle consists of saving your file and hitting "refresh" in the browser.

 

I think the downside to JS is going straight into structured object oriented programming and having to grapple with the DOM. There's also the difficulty of debugging (although firebug makes that a joy these days).

 

I'd personally start with something like python, where the first interactions can take place in the interpreter on the command line, a=1, print a, a=a+1, etc. It's handily free, available for many platforms and has extensive libraries available.

 

As for programming being easy, I think that is misleading. Apart from trivial programs which demonstrate features of a language, it's almost impossible to decouple the programming from the problem solving. So whether it is easy or difficult is more down to the scope and complexity of the problem you are trying to solve than the facilities of the particular language or the bag of techniques that the programmer can dip into.

[SYNACK]

As for programming being easy, I think that is misleading. Apart from trivial programs which demonstrate features of a language, it's almost impossible to decouple the programming from the problem solving. So whether it is easy or difficult is more down to the scope and complexity of the problem you are trying to solve than the facilities of the particular language or the bag of techniques that the programmer can dip into.

I think that you are right in that good programing being easy is largely misleading. The fundimentals of the languages are generally reasonably easy to pick up but the actual problem solving and analytical steps are more difficult to teach but are also the important and useful in the long run.

[mac_shinobi]

I think that you are right in that good programing being easy is largely misleading. The fundimentals of the languages are generally reasonably easy to pick up but the actual problem solving and analytical steps are more difficult to teach but are also the important and useful in the long run.

 

Not trying to side step here but are there any good books ( regardless of which language, java, c#, C++ or whatever ) that goes through all the above things as far as fundamentals to the more advanced things

 

Would be nice to make an application something fun like an mp3 player or something thats a bit more then just a showing if caps lock is on or off

 

Appologies for side tracking

[JJonas]

Not sure if mentioned but Gamemaker is worth a look if you want something to get kids started in programming. Edited June 7, 2011 by JJonas

[pcstru]

Not trying to side step here but are there any good books ( regardless of which language, java, c#, C++ or whatever ) that goes through all the above things as far as fundamentals to the more advanced things

 

Abelson and Sussman - "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

[dhicks]

The fundimentals of the languages are generally reasonably easy to pick up but the actual problem solving and analytical steps are more difficult to teach but are also the important and useful in the long run.

 

I think problem solving and analysis are the difficult bits, and the bits worth learning, but those aren't unique to computer programming - programming should just be another tool in a learner's set of available techniques to help them find answers to, and pose, questions. We need to avoid dirfting over into teaching school pupils software development - they can wait until at least post-16 education for that and go and do a 2 or 3 year dedicated course, but programming as one tool for thinking about problems is useful from primary age. As such, we maybe don't give children enough credit when it comes to what we think they'll find "interesting" - children don't neccesarily need lots of graphics and extranious stuff to keep their attention, in fact, I'm sure the average child will see straight through any attempts to try and dress up a "dull" subject. Good teaching is what makes an interesting lesson. The very basics of computer programming should easily cover most child's needs, although room to explore for the interested pupil is always good, of course - as pointed out above, Python would be an excellent choice for a language that can be used very simply and expanded upon later if wished.