[LINK] Computer Science in Australian Schools

[Craig Sanders]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 01:40:10AM +0000, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> Yes! Agreed whole-heartdly, Craig! We need to be teaching programming
> open-source and developing widely and across the board, in my opinion.

while i agree with what you're saying about CompSci education, it wasn't
exactly what i was talking about.

yes, there's definitely a need for real Computer Science education -
understanding the hardware, programming, software engineering, data
modeling, and more.

but my mini-rant was about how, with very few exceptions, schools and
teachers aren't even using them as tools for education. teachers were
doing amazing stuff with hypercard in the 80s. hardly any are doing
anything even remotely similar these days, with any tools (and the tools
and the computers are MUCH better now than they were then)


> And frankly it's a wonder to me that the ACS is not jumping up
> and down and *demanding* a strong emphasis on computer science
> school curriculum available across the board, and in all Australian
> schools. We need this!

FYI: similar rumblings on that topic in the US...saw the following in
the Jan 6 Linux Weekly News...

"Computer science education and free software"

http://lwn.net/Articles/368865/


it's LWN's free-software angle on this article in the NYT:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/computer-science-education-its-not-shop-class/

http://cs4edu.cs.purdue.edu/_media/nsf_ap_cs_10000execsumm_ed.pdf

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>