School ICT lessons a ‘turn-off’
School ICT lessons a ‘turn-off’

School ICT lessons a ‘turn-off’

We are now watching the enthusiasm of the next generation waste away through poorly conceived courses and syllabuses. Professor Steve Furber Royal Society

The article highlighted Steve Furbers quote and as a former ICT teacher, I am not going to disagree completely, ICT for Business as a core unit is often met by our students with mild loathing. This said our board, OCR, offer over 20 different units and there are plenty of engaging ICT topics to chosen. Webpage design, digital imaging, use of video, audio, and then more practical unit titles such as Repair and decommission of IT equipment and Application of data logging. Now, as yet I have not worked out how to introduce Repair and decommission IT equipment to 30 students, but it is an option. Perhaps the key omission in the unit titles was the much anticipated ‘hoped for’ Games programming unit. Whether Mission Maker, Scratch, Kodu, Construct or recently released Games Salad (links) and Atmopshir – edugaming / programming engages students in much the same way as design technology and textiles. It is the invention, over coming challenges and seeing your designs realised, that empowers students. (This is not to excuse the absence of Flash – respected colleague @GideonWilliams has outlined many times what fantastic progress his students make with this platform in relatively short periods of time). Exam board #fail.

The article goes onto to stress that….

Young people have huge appetites for the computing devices they use outside of school. Yet ICT and computer science in school seem to turn these young people off.

Yes they do, but in my conversations with students, (whose input that is sorely missing from the article) their free time ICT interests are more recreational or practical. Downloading, playing, editing, creating, browsing, communicating, posting, discussing, ducking, diving and re-spawning.  In fact, we have only 2 students at Hamble College who have actively expressed a casual interest in ‘programming’ and / or ‘coding’ even though we do introduce all our students to Scratch in Years 7 and 8. In their school ‘free-time’ they would rather investigate / learn / play with Powder than programme or code.

A second group not represented in the article are Secondary and tertiary ICT teachers. Is our opinion not of value here? The facts stand strong, 33% fall, between 2003 and 2009, in ICT A-level candidates, the inference that it is my inability to inspire my students that angers me, and not just me, ‘not on my watch (I hope)’ tweets @daibarnes. Maybe it is the A Level content that is uninspiring?

According to the only A Level student up and willing to respond via Twitter before 9am…. perhaps so.

A Level student

@digitalmaverick would appear to support this view, suggesting that

A level’s largely a) Access project focussed b) lack of depth of content & coverage of triviality c) repetition of content (like DPA) frm GCSE

Of the two students passionate about IT as opposed to ICT, one is building his own website from the ground up and the other is teaching himself Objective-C and the only barrier to him publishing his Apps are the developer fees. Are these students going to be inspired by access? Come on BBC you can do better than that #fail.

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