Comment by robertskmiles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robertskmiles | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone from outside the UK is thinking "Wow, those brits are doing really well here, I wish my country could take such a sensible approach to computing education", well you're kind of right, it's an enormous improvement, but I feel it needs to be made clear just how bad the situation is right now, before the changes come into effect.

I'm a geek who now has a degree in CS, and at school IT lessons were pretty much my least favourite lesson apart from Games. We didn't learn anything. That's not hyperbole, I really doubt anyone learned anything in those lessons. And it wasn't like I was so amazing I knew it all already, everyone knew it all already. I've been in lessons where I already know the content, and what happens is people get stuck and you can help them out. That never happened, everyone already knew what they were doing, because we already wrote our essays in Word, did our class presentations in Powerpoint and our experimental data collation in Excel. We knew it already and the exercises were just asinine.

Everything I knew about CS before I started my degree, I taught myself.

Also, the school I was at was officially an "IT/Maths specialist school" or something like that (edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_Computing_Coll...), and in the year I graduated it won The Sunday Times' State School of the Year award.

I was in the first intake of the "new" style A-Level system, where 4 or 5 AS-Levels were taken in year one, then 3 A-Levels taken forward to year 2.

I dropped CompSci at AS-Level after seeing what a joke it was (took English, Maths and Physics instead), although I had never really done any programming at all. Just HTML.

One of the best/worst things about the "new" system (I say new, as it was new when I did it, but it's now a decade old, of course) is that the introduced "Key Skills" classes, where you had to learn literacy, numeracy and IT.

Apparently, while English and Maths got me out the first two, CS wasn't good enough to get me out of doing Mail Merges. So I didn't go anyway, and my tutor would be sent nastygrams every so often saying I was failing by not turning up. My tutor's response? "Oh, I put them in the bin."

Before I dropped ICT; a project in year 9 involved designing a database. It's usually taught in access, I did it in MySQL. I received low marks because of that.

As you should've done. MySQL wasn't being taught.

It was meant to be about database design, tables and sql. Not access specifically. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/11/digital-lite... has some more examples.

Yes, and I assume it was to be assessed with what the teacher, and the curriculum, were instructed to assess.

Just because you feel MySQL is better doesn't mean you should get bonus points.

I agree using Access to teach database design is stupid, but that's hopefully something that this will address. Going against the curriculum because you feel you're above the instructed way is a fantastic way to get low marks.

Fortunately when it comes to university there's usually flexibility if you want to go above and beyond the minimum, but you still have to tick the boxes of being able to meet their assessment criteria.

Edit: And what happened in that article is what should've happened, in my opinion. You don't get bonus points for being a smart arse. IT teaching is woefully poor, there's no way that teacher could assess a proper app when the original assignment proposed a mock-app in PowerPoint.

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