On 26 August 2010 18:33, alan c <aecl...@candt.waitrose.com> wrote: > On 26/08/10 07:10, alan c wrote: >> or nearly that, anyway..... >> >> Article: >> Royal Society opens inquiry into why kids hate tech >> Lessons that is, not games, mobiles, Facebook: >> >> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/25/royal_society_schools_computing/ >> >> 'exam results have shown computing subjects are failing to grab kids' >> attention' >> >> Could it be that a strong bias towards proprietary products is not >> inspiring students? >> Would more appreciation of Free Software in education enable better >> use of talents? >> >> Express your views to the Royal Society soon. >> http://royalsociety.org/Education-Policy/Projects/ > > I earnestly implore all people with opinions on this subject to make > contributions to the investigation. Thanks
After recently studying Computing and IT at A-Level, I have picked out a lot of problems with todays curricula. I found that, even my teacher accepted this, the curriculum was very out-dated. The book we had, dated 2009 or 2010 described a computer with 16kb RAM. My teacher went to a conference, and when she returned, she described the person, head of the Computing, and possibly IT curriculum, as a "Long beard and sandals with socks man." She didn't mean any offense by this, she was implying that he was very old-hat when it came to computing, and seemed to lack any form of creativity. I also found that having Visual Basic shoved down my throat was actually choosing of the college, and reading some of the posts others have made, it seems that it is widely used. I was stuck with VB6, and the excuse for this was that other good languages cost too much money, what they meant to say, was other Microsoft languages (Where I say languages, I mean RAD suites, or programming environments - whatever you want to call them) cost too much money. I showed the male teacher, who is a self professed geek, Gambas, which is a basic RAD for GNU/Linux, and he really liked it, but said because of the computer contract with Research Machines, they could not install other operating systems on the PC's they paid £500 EACH for (Core2Duo 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Vista- but downgraded to XP by RM), they could not use it. I mumbled something about CodeGear Delphi and Virtualbox and dropped the conversation then. It just seems that schools are stuck with Windows, because of whatever reason, and the teaching staff, some of which are actually very qualified, just have to play along. I tried to get one of them to complain to the exam board about the definitions in some of the newest books, which were totally incorrect nowadays, and they couldn't be bothered. Shame, really. -- Regards, Kris Douglas. T. 0845 004 2066 | M. 07728574285 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
