This country is a joke

[Brad]

[speedlolita]

George Osbourne speaks there as if he's a master coder.

I can't watch more. What I found funny is that I was discouraged from web stuff when I was gonna go college and Uni because it was too common then. Times change for the worse I guess?

[Cepp]

Sounds like a step up from the crap I was taught during IT class in the 90s.

[Duncan James Waugh]

So non-computer scientists teaching early primary school children, who haven't had their solid grounding in maths or sciences yet, "how to write code", I shudder to think how many bad habits those kids are going to have to unlearn.

[Brad]

She's like Jen from the IT Crowd.

[charlesr]

[Duncan James Waugh]

To be fair school gives you the skills that are necessary to execute on those entreprenuerial visions that he is talking about. Certainly my experience at a state grammar was that it was all about building that stuff as part of your academic achievement. He seems to think the academic side encourages you not to think for yourself and and be creative, that wasn't my experience of GCSEs or A-Levels. He also seems to think scientists aren't entreprenuerial, where does he think all of our technological and scientific inventions come from?

[charlesr]

It's all too "blanket coverage". Kids that want to code will show an aptitude for it themselves (I guess this was easier in the days when you had to code your own games....). We shouldn't force everyone to learn code because it's not a universal skill (unlike basic maths). Similarly we shouldn't force everyone to learn how to be leaders and business builders, because most people just want to sit back and be told what to do.

But both options should be available, along with a bunch of other things.

[bwi]

Sad thing about this is when the raspberry pi came out and i was all excited about it, i mentioned it to my missus. She came back from school a few days later and told me she mentioned it to her colleague (ICT head of a primary school) and he just wasn't interested.
I suggested taking it in to show him and mention about getting kids at a young age getting used to small scale coding (the ethos of the Pi)
She was pretty miffed when he just basically ignored her, only later showing her the brand new box of Ipads the school had received.

Its not the kids its the teachers that are the problem.

[Brad]

True. My daughter's school have rejected the normal ICT syllabus basically because they think it's a bit of a waste of time and are running proper software engineering modules instead.

[Dogg Thang]

I have this idea that in the future we'll all be living in virtual worlds. But every single week, a major online company has a huge security breach. Most recently Kickstarter and also, more worrying, some company that does in-house technology - stuff that could be running your house in a few years. Car chips can be remotely hacked and, well... you know the stories. Security is a joke.

And so I think about these virtual worlds we might create and I can't help think this coding push is just breeding the next generation of hackers that will make this all unworkable.

[DoDonJoshua]

I wrote my first lines of code accidently in flash back when I was in high school, really enjoyed it. I am a bit too young for the days of BBC coding, but never the less I do code in my bedrooom aha. I think teaching kids <12 how to code is a little bit silly. I would rather children are taught problem solving skills and 'logical thinking', then that has a larger application and maybe these kids could do any number of things. I believe Math to be a really important subject, not so much the stuff kids are taught, but things such as number visualisation and storage (you know, data structures and algorithms), it goes a long way in more things than code and math.

For me, 3D and 2D space hasn't been covered enough, not even in my undergrad degree, that's a subject sorely lacking; but it's something covered on the internet well.

I have taught kids code. Generally I use Unity3D and teach them how to make space invaders, it's not pure code route, but I've found it be useful. Especially teaching children <10 about 2D and 3D space.