[ubuntu-uk] (Marketing) Royal Society asks you - why IT is boring?

[Kris Douglas]

On 26 August 2010 18:33, alan c <aeclist at candt.waitrose.com> wrote:
> On 26/08/10 07:10, alan c wrote:
>> or nearly that, anyway.....
>>
>> Article:
>> Royal Society opens inquiry into why kids hate tech
>> Lessons that is, not games, mobiles, Facebook:
>>
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/25/royal_society_schools_computing/
>>
>> 'exam results have shown computing subjects are failing to grab kids'
>> attention'
>>
>> Could it be that a strong bias towards proprietary products is not
>> inspiring students?
>> Would more appreciation of Free Software in education enable better
>> use of talents?
>>
>> Express your views to the Royal Society soon.
>> http://royalsociety.org/Education-Policy/Projects/
>
> I earnestly implore all people with opinions on this subject to make
> contributions to the investigation. Thanks

After recently studying Computing and IT at A-Level, I have picked out
a lot of problems with todays curricula. I found that, even my teacher
accepted this, the curriculum was very out-dated. The book we had,
dated 2009 or 2010 described a computer with 16kb RAM. My teacher went
to a conference, and when she returned, she described the person, head
of the Computing, and possibly IT curriculum, as a "Long beard and
sandals with socks man." She didn't mean any offense by this, she was
implying that he was very old-hat when it came to computing, and
seemed to lack any form of creativity. I also found that having Visual
Basic shoved down my throat was actually choosing of the college, and
reading some of the posts others have made, it seems that it is widely
used. I was stuck with VB6, and the excuse for this was that other
good languages cost too much money, what they meant to say, was other
Microsoft languages (Where I say languages, I mean RAD suites, or
programming environments - whatever you want to call them) cost too
much money. I showed the male teacher, who is a self professed geek,
Gambas, which is a basic RAD for GNU/Linux, and he really liked it,
but said because of the computer contract with Research Machines, they
could not install other operating systems on the PC's they paid £500
EACH for (Core2Duo 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Vista- but downgraded
to XP by RM), they could not use it. I mumbled something about
CodeGear Delphi and Virtualbox and dropped the conversation then.

It just seems that schools are stuck with Windows, because of whatever
reason, and the teaching staff, some of which are actually very
qualified, just have to play along. I tried to get one of them to
complain to the exam board about the definitions in some of the newest
books, which were totally incorrect nowadays, and they couldn't be
bothered.

Shame, really.

-- 
Regards, Kris Douglas.
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