British Schoolkids To Be Taught Computer Coding 247
An anonymous reader writes "The UK government has finally decided to do something about the dire state of IT and computer science teaching in the country: it will create a new 'IT-centric' General Certificate of Secondary Education that will cover computational principles, systemic thinking, software development and logic. The current ICT GCSE has been lambasted for boring kids to death with lessons on using Word and Excel, rather than teaching computer programming."
Re:Not just for jobs (Score:5, Informative)
I agree.
I tell people all the time, a little bit of programming experience goes a long way.
It isn't just about being a programmer by trade. You come across problems now and then in Excel that can't be solved any other way besides some VBA. Maybe you don't know VBA, but if you understand logical program flow, objects, etc... some Google will get you the rest of the syntax. My Biologist wife and I had to sit down and get her going with R. A few times in the Army I've had to process a shit-ton of text data and a perl script came in handy. A little programming knowledge has helped me out many times in normal life. I'm no programmer.
We all probably have tons of examples where just programming literacy and understanding of systematic thinking and logical flow have come in super handy. Just learning how to abstract a problem, break it into parts, and turn it into an algorithm.... forget the code, that is educational. Kids *should* be exposed to this. It will give them skills that will serve them well later.