Five ways to make Curriculum IT exciting again

[McLovin]

Students have lost interest in learning about IT — largely thanks to an education system that has been teaching office skills to children and calling it computing.

England's IT curriculum is facing a massive shake-up and Australian IT student numbers haven't been meeting demand. Here's how to show students (and grown-ups) that computing is fun.

1. Make programming easy
   • Sitting down and learning the programming vernacular, the nuances of variables, methods and objects, can be daunting.
     
     But there are plenty of ways to learn programming that are gentle on beginners, such as tools that allow users to create programs by using drag-and-drop or tile-based interfaces. Examples include MIT's Scratch, Microsoft's Kodu, Alice and GameMaker.
     
     These provide a simple way for tech amateurs to learn about behaviours like changing variables and creating branching programs without having to get their hands dirty with code.
     
     For anyone wanting to get a bit closer to programming languages themselves there are sites like Codecademy, which teaches users JavaScript via a series of interactive tutorials, starting with the basics and explaining each step.
     
     While tools such as Greenfoot provide a programming environment that helps novices get to grips with Java and object-oriented programming using a simple GUI.
     
     If none of these tools hit the spot then there's the forthcoming Raspberry Pi, a US$25 Linux computer created with the ambition of making it easy to learn coding, which can be set up to boot straight into programming environments for a variety of languages, such as Python or C.
     
     Computing at School, a group dedicated to promoting good IT teaching, also provides links to many other useful free resources on computing.

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[LoftedAphid86]

RE: Five ways to make IT exciting again

'Bout time for it to change.
I've been completing 'computing' tasks, set within the first five minutes of the lesson and having to wait around for the last 55+ minutes pretending to add on to the work otherwise they'll start complaining that I'm not doing the work despite the fact that I've completed it way passed the standard of the rest of the class already, for the last few years now. I need something a bit more challenging.
They also don't let you take IT programming as a GCSE, at least where I am, and I don't think that they do it for A level either.
They're basically saying 'If you want something harder, then Google it.'.

 

[Vextor]

RE: Five ways to make IT exciting again

Meh, I never payed any attention to school curriculum. I just simply code when I can using a book.