[LINK] Young Aussies losing ground in digital economy

[Janet Hawtin]

On 25 January 2016 at 13:34, Stephen Loosley <stephenloosley at outlook.com>
wrote:
>
>
> Seems like Heston complaining about Food Science / Home Eco being taught
> in schools
> because students may misunderstand the tools, language or recipes and make
> mistakes.
> And, what would Shorten know about teaching Info Tech? Some seem to be
> sucked in by
> politician-simple-speak. Make no mistake the people who design your
> "coding" national
> syllabus will be just as IT-aware as you and us. They will encourage an IT
> empowerment
> by kids creating functioning, and real, IT sugar-scoops. Not simply using
> IT, controlling IT.
> That's what schools are about .. empowering students, including regards
> info technology.


I can't imagine Heston complaining about practical scientific
experimentation by anyone.
It is what inspires him.? It would be great if IT and coding in schools
could take a Heston approach?

Alan Kay is always challenging
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

I found it via
GopherCon 2015: Katherine Cox Buday - Simplicity and Go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6mEo_FHZ5Y
Which raises some interesting thoughts about how languages and code
communities grow.

The challenge with learning computing in a forward looking way is that it
largely comes to us as a set of existing and inert tools with a shelflife.
In uni I learned how to use a typesetter at the time when computers were
making them obsolete. I have never seen one since.

It would be good if the kind of learning was able to unpack, question and
think beyond the tools at hand?
This is why the art, science, computing, economics, society intersections
would be nice to look at?
Making board games to challenge or model a real life problem and then
trying that in hardware and code could be an interesting journey?

But experiencing that you yourself can make things, even a sugar scoop or
bread board is also a win
for a society where design with manufacturing is not for the most part, an
observable part of the local economy.

If we would like it to be in order to have local generation and development
of innovation then we need to be able to have support, room, tools, time,
legal space, and confidence to have a go and see things through to
manufacture?
TAFE had a lot of this but needs to reclaim the space and functionality?

Janet