"Coding" in schools...

Arcade_Tryer wrote: »

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Primary yes, not nessecailry secondary and certinaly not leaving cert. The required Maths and English for eveyday life should be well sorted by the time a student is 14/15. Leaving Cert English/Maths is far from essential: plenty of people don;t know mch about complex geometry or Shakespeare yet still manage to function.

Permabear wrote: »

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Some yes, some no. Why should economics and politics be seen as parents responsibilty but English and maths not?

I'm fine with it as an optional subject only, although it's a pile of sh**e in my opinion.

DredFX wrote: »

Executing a program in Eclipse.

Cathartic.

FYP

jimgoose wrote: »

The latest stroke of genius from our Imperious Leaders appears to be teaching Computer Science for the Leaving Cert:

http://www.thejournal.ie/coding-irish-curriculum-3099021-Nov2016/

I think, rather than jumping on this latest "cool" bandwagon, diverting yet more attention and resources from the teaching of proper core knowledge and in the process giving teachers even more to complain about, it would be rather more in their line to try to reform the current ridiculous exam-passing machine approach to secondary education, and maybe add a US-style driver's education module to try to prevent youngsters from killing themselves be the dozen. I also resent the notion of our school curricula being influenced, even in small part, by some Segway-riding Californian twit who's just invented YASPL*.

What say ye?



* Yet Another Stupid Programming Language

Yeah best sticking to core stuff like religion and Irish

Widdershins wrote: »

I'm fine with it as an optional subject only, although it's a pile of sh**e in my opinion.

Really? You think your post just got here by magic

As a software engineer for the last 20 years, I think it's a great idea, but it has the potential to go horribly wrong if it's not implemented in the right way. I've been doing some little sessions with transition year students over the last few years who have come in for 'work experience'. They typically have little or no knowledge of coding, some have a little bit but nothing close to being proficient in any language. Thats fine.

What you have do to is show them the relevance of coding and how it can be useful in their daily life. I don't start them off doing meaningless programs which only live inside the machine - I get them working with stuff like arduino, raspberry pi, esp8266 stuff, which can be used to produce a physical result, like turning on a light, or a motor or whatever. They can see the result of their work, they can tweak it in small iterations and have stuff like a PIR sensor sensing when they approach, taking a photo using the raspberry pi camera and emailing it to their email address - you dress it up as saying you could use this to make sure your brother or sister don't come into your room and steal whatever - make it something they can relate to. Every one of them to date have found it interesting, and were well able to figure out how to make improvements and modifications to the code to make it better.

Once they have discovered what it is that their code can be used for, then it's time to look at becoming more deeply immersed in coding as a discipline, delving deep into the underlying theory of mutexes, semaphores, threads, classes etc - but without the ability to understand why this might be useful, it is hard to sell it as something worth learning.

These days the amount of stuff like adafruit, arduino, raspberry pi, sensors of all sorts which is available is incredible, and I think it's this sort of stuff which should be utilized first and foremost, rather than sitting there printing hello world, or goodbye earth, or making another bank account application.

The flip side is that I do not believe that everyone has the capability to become a professional programmer. In the same way that not everyone can become an artist, or a sculptor, or a fashion designer or an author etc. Yes everyone can hold a pencil or a paintbrush but few can master it sufficiently to make a living. Same with coding, there's definitely a mindset that I don't believe can be taught if it's not there. But without exposing the kids to it, they'll never know if they'd be good at it.

And I honestly don't know who's going to be able to teach the kids how to code, since you can't teach something you don't yourself understand. Perhaps the most sensible approach would be for a group of schools in an area to come together and between them employ someone with the skills to rotate between schools on a rota or daily basis or something, someone perhaps who is involved in stuff like coder dojo, who can make it interesting enough for the kids to get excited about it, interested in it and see where it goes from there.

TLDR; a great idea if done correctly, which I hope it will be, but won't be easy to get right.

I would be the first to call out the clowns in power but by far this is the best idea tney've had in a very long time. This will give more reason for big cimpanies to come here for the talent pool and will encourage entreneurial spirit amoungst the younger generation

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Surely any attempt to rectify this should be welcomed though?

completely agree, corporate tax rates should be much higher than they are. easier said than done though