Thoughts on #codingforkids
This week, government minister Michael Gove announced government plans proposing that current school ICT is replaced by a new Computer Science GCSE. I have no actual numbers for this, but my guess is that most people think this is a great idea. Why wouldn’t we want kids to learn to code?
The tricky part comes when we start to dig into the detail. What will the new curriculum contain? How will it be taught? Who will teach it?
One thing I am clear about is that the choice of programming language should be left to individual teachers and pupils.
What I’d like to see the new curriculum achieve:
- sharpen creative and analytical skills through projects and play
- understand abstraction and think in an abstracted way
- self-teaching through experimentation and research
- learn to modularise and classify problems and solutions
- understand algorithms, data structures, interface, and state
This is what I personally understand as ‘computational thinking’.
The end results, be it an mobile app, a game, or a robot controller and the languages used, should result from the skills and interests of teachers and students.
