Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Learning to code (with george osborne!)

cliffski

So there is this new government initiative in the UK where apparently every student in the country will be taught some programming in an effort to increase the technical knowledge of the future workforce. I see this as an extremely good thing. It surprises me that we have gone this long without introducing it as part of the school day anyway. Physics, Biology,Chemistry & programming? They seem like fairly equivalent importance to me, although I think we should add in ‘Engineering’ too. What slightly worries me is that the depth of the courses will not go far enough.

The general theme behind all this is that schools have been teaching people how to use Excel, rather than teaching them programming. This is clearly a bad thing, partly because most kids know how to use excel anyway, but the problem is, the grasp of what ‘programming’ really means seems incredibly weak amongst those who are discussing it. I keep seeing discussions where politicians and campaigners talk about how ‘you too’ can learn the ‘complexities of HTML’, and equate this to an understanding of how computers work.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for people understanding how HTML works, but we can surely go further than that right? Shouldn’t we be encouraging kids to go a bit further down the programming rabbit hole? At the very least php and java-script. ideally all the way to C# or even a real-mans language like C++*. I wouldn’t be shocked if everyone understood at least in principle what assembler was. (I know I could do with learning some more there). My point isn’t that we need a million C++ coders, but that understanding ‘a bit’ about how it works means it’s much easier to find the 1% of kids who really do want to study that sort of stuff, and in any case knowing a ‘bit’ about the next-most-complex layer of a technology is always beneficial. I’m not an assembly language programmer, but I’m not horrified to click on the breakdown in aqtime and look at my codes assembler breakdown either. Knowledge is good.

I know you have to start somewhere, and people think that stuff like C++ will scare people off, but hey, lets set some lofty ambitions shall we? At the very least lets not make the mistake of giving an entire generation of kids the idea that Windows 8 was programmed in HTML and that this is as low-level as it gets. There is more to coding than HTML and phone apps. A lot, lot more.

*I’m kidding**

**sort of :D

 

2 thoughts on Learning to code (with george osborne!)

  1. For me, Scheme would be the educational language of choice. It’s a great toy, helps you to think about all aspects of programming, without requiring you to become much of a software engineer (like Java or C++ would) in the process.

  2. OK Let’s start from the top. Year of Code has nothing to do with the governement and is an independant body encouraging people to learn a little bit of programming. The Department for Education has made changes to the core circumullum from the September 2014, with children from the age of five being computing [1]. There is a fallacy that programming was not taught to children before this will be introduced, whilst it is correct that not every school taught programming and computers, only ICT, there are many that do currently.

    “I wouldn’t be shocked if everyone understood at least in principle what assembler was.”
    The key stage 3 states: “understand how instructions are stored and executed within a computer system” and currently schools teach the fetch and execute cycle along the Von Neumann architecture.

    The problem is that people who either know nothing about Computer Science, teaching or what is currently being taught in school keep making comments that are not helpful. You can now add yourself to that list.

    [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study

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