'DULL' COMPUTER CLASSES BEEFED UP
11 Jan 2012 Last updated at 01:06 ET
By Judith Burns Education reporter, BBC News
The stream programme of information and communications technology (ICT) investigate in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the preparation cabinet member will make known later.
It will be transposed by an “open source” curriculum in computer science and programming written with the assistance of universities and industry.
Michael Gove will call the stream ICT curriculum “harmful and dull”.
He will proceed a conference subsequent week on the new computing curriculum.
He will contend this will emanate immature people “able to work at the forefront of technological change”.
Speaking at the BETT uncover for tutorial technology in London, Mr Gove will make known skeleton to free up schools to use curricula and training resources that scrupulously supply pupils for the 21st Century.
He will contend that resources, grown by experts, are already accessible online to assistance schools sense computer scholarship and he wants universities and businesses to digest new courses and exams, quite a new computing GCSE.
The preparation cabinet member will contend that the unsound preparation in computing offering by the stream curriculum is in risk of deleterious Britain’s mercantile prospects.
He will call for a reconstruction of the bequest of British computer colonize Alan Turing whose work in the 1930s laid the substructure of the complicated computing industry.
“Imagine the thespian shift which could be probable in only a couple of years, once we mislay the roadblock of the existent ICT curriculum.
“Instead of young kids wearied out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by wearied teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write elementary 2D computer animations,” he will say.
Computer games businessman Ian Livingstone, an confidant to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds formulating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own elementary programming language.
‘Slaves to the interface’
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Mr Livingstone, co-author of final year’s Next Gen inform which highlighted the bad peculiarity of computer training in schools, told BBC news: “The stream lessons are radically not pertinent to today’s era of young kids who can sense PowerPoint in a week.”
“It’s a caricature since our birthright as the many beautiful republic in the world.
“Children are being forced to sense how to use applications, rsther than than to make them. They are apropos slaves to the user interface and are all wearied by it,” he said.
Other experts uttered concerns about a necessity of teachers competent to broach the new curriculum.
Bill Mitchell, of British Computing Society, said: “It is extensive that Michael Gove is personally endorsing the importance of training mechanism scholarship in schools.
“There are, of course, poignant hurdles to overcome, privately with the evident necessity of mechanism scholarship teachers.”
While Prof Steve Furber, authority of an approaching Royal Society inform on computing in schools, pronounced non-specialist teachers competence find the engorgement of pick training resources confusing.
“We demeanour brazen to conference more about how the supervision intends to await non-specialist teachers who make up the infancy of the workforce in delivering an glorious ICT preparation but central superintendence on doctrine content,” he said.
11 Jan 2012 Last updated at 01:06 ET
By Judith Burns Education reporter, BBC News
The stream programme of information and communications technology (ICT) investigate in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the preparation cabinet member will make known later.
It will be transposed by an “open source” curriculum in computer science and programming written with the assistance of universities and industry.
Michael Gove will call the stream ICT curriculum “harmful and dull”.
He will proceed a conference subsequent week on the new computing curriculum.
He will contend this will emanate immature people “able to work at the forefront of technological change”.
Speaking at the BETT uncover for tutorial technology in London, Mr Gove will make known skeleton to free up schools to use curricula and training resources that scrupulously supply pupils for the 21st Century.
He will contend that resources, grown by experts, are already accessible online to assistance schools sense computer scholarship and he wants universities and businesses to digest new courses and exams, quite a new computing GCSE.
The preparation cabinet member will contend that the unsound preparation in computing offering by the stream curriculum is in risk of deleterious Britain’s mercantile prospects.
He will call for a reconstruction of the bequest of British computer colonize Alan Turing whose work in the 1930s laid the substructure of the complicated computing industry.
“Imagine the thespian shift which could be probable in only a couple of years, once we mislay the roadblock of the existent ICT curriculum.
“Instead of young kids wearied out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by wearied teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write elementary 2D computer animations,” he will say.
Computer games businessman Ian Livingstone, an confidant to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds formulating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own elementary programming language.
‘Slaves to the interface’
Please spin on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Mr Livingstone, co-author of final year’s Next Gen inform which highlighted the bad peculiarity of computer training in schools, told BBC news: “The stream lessons are radically not pertinent to today’s era of young kids who can sense PowerPoint in a week.”
“It’s a caricature since our birthright as the many beautiful republic in the world.
“Children are being forced to sense how to use applications, rsther than than to make them. They are apropos slaves to the user interface and are all wearied by it,” he said.
Other experts uttered concerns about a necessity of teachers competent to broach the new curriculum.
Bill Mitchell, of British Computing Society, said: “It is extensive that Michael Gove is personally endorsing the importance of training mechanism scholarship in schools.
“There are, of course, poignant hurdles to overcome, privately with the evident necessity of mechanism scholarship teachers.”
While Prof Steve Furber, authority of an approaching Royal Society inform on computing in schools, pronounced non-specialist teachers competence find the engorgement of pick training resources confusing.
“We demeanour brazen to conference more about how the supervision intends to await non-specialist teachers who make up the infancy of the workforce in delivering an glorious ICT preparation but central superintendence on doctrine content,” he said.