Teach Our Kids To Code (UK e-petition)

[the.weavster]

There's some background here: http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2011/09/ ... -petition/

And the e-petition itself is here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15081

Please give it some support

[netmaestro]

That's really quite shocking. Surely the teacher had options. One could be to send the work out for evaluation, another would be to judge the finished product first and then sit down with the student for a detailed explanation of how it works and why. All the teacher really needs at that stage would be to form an opinion as to whether the student actually did the work himself or not. Can they really be so myopic and stupid as to just fail a student for excelling too much?

[Zach]

NM,

wtf ??? Did you reply to the wrong post ?

[netmaestro]

No, the info I replied to is in the links.

[Kuron]

The word coding is a slang term for computer programming, used because programming basically means writing source code.

The blog post would carry a lot more weight if it was written by somebody who actually knew the difference between coding and programming. Until s/he can learn the difference, they have no business teaching anything computer related to children.

[Zach]

That's news to me. I use "coding" the same way.

[Zach]

No, the info I replied to is in the links.

I can't seem to find it...

[netmaestro]

Look for "My ICT teacher can't mark my homework". Here's an excerpt from where I was reading:

When I was in year 10 (or 11, I can’t remember) we were given the brief to “design and create a multimedia product” for an assessment towards GCSE ICT.

Most people opted to use powerpoint to create a sudo-multimedia product. I, however, decided to build a true multimedia product in Objective-C (a small game written for iPhone & iPod Touch which included a couple of videos, some story text, audio, it was an awesome little thing, it really was

The Powerpoints passed with flying colors, my project failed.

I asked the head of IT why he failed me, he told me he simply couldn’t mark it. He had installed the app on his iPhone, as had the rest of the IT staff (Including the technicians who really loved it!), played it, but couldn’t mark it because a)He didn’t understand how it worked and b)It was leagues above anything else he’d ever seen from the class.

I argued the case and managed to scrape a pass by teaching him the basics of Objective-C from scratch and by commenting every single line of code I wrote to explain exactly what it did and how it did it (all 3,400 lines, including standard libraries I used) which ended up being a huge time sink. Time, I was constantly aware, I could be relaxing or working on a project of my own.

I understand that my case is a little different from the one involving Ruby, you can’t expect every IT teacher to be versed in iPhone development, but there is no excuse for not having at least a basic understanding of Ruby/Python and absolutely no excuse for failing work because its difficult to mark.

[Zach]

Yeah I managed to find it just before you posted that.

It's nothing new, teachers pull this shit all the time in every field. When my brother was in Highschool he got poor grades, or failed once or something, by his teacher because he was doing Math in his head and didn't show the work. I think it was calculus or algebra or something like that.

[the.weavster]

That's news to me. I use "coding" the same way.

Me too.

It's nothing new, teachers pull this shit all the time in every field.

In Britain lots of 'teachers' in state schools are not well qualified in the subject they are 'teaching':

Subject league table of percentage of teachers without a relevant degree:
ICT (computing) - 87 per cent
Religious Education - 78 per cent
Drama - 75 per cent
Physical education - 75 per cent
Design technology - 74 per cent
Business studies - 70 per cent
Classics - 67 per cent
AVERAGE - 67 per cent
Spanish - 63 per cent
Maths - 58 per cent
German - 53 per cent
English - 49 per cent
Geography - 47 per cent
French - 46 per cent
Art and design - 46 per cent
History - 43 per cent
Music - 41 per cent
Combined / general science - 38 per cent
Physics - 37 per cent
Biology - 29 per cent
Chemistry - 28 per cent

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... jects.html