Off topic (again) but hey, better than no topic at all.<\/p>\n
With my own two children (now 7 and 11) growing up fast, I am increasingly interested in what they learn under the heading of ICT at school. As far as I can tell from my eldest, this involves learning Word, Excel and Powerpoint. All well and good as these are useful skills but it’s not the kinds of IT I learnt. Not “was taught” because we were riding the wave of ZX spectrums and BBC micros so taught ourselves and made it up as we went along.<\/p>\n
What I learnt was basic programming. Basic by name and basic by nature. And via peek and poke into the world of machine code programming.<\/p>\n
I think these programming skills are fundamental to an understanding of IT and I would like my two to learn them. I don’t hold out much hope of them learning this at school (maybe I will be proved wrong, which would be great). I’m not going to force them to read Knuth’s “Fundamental Algorithms” and they’re not going to pick it up themselves from their laptop which is good for word processing and Facebook.<\/p>\n
So I have started teaching my daughter the basic concepts of programming using python. She gets plenty of maths homework which is at the stage that is perfectly suited to writing small programs to e.g. find out all the factors of a given number. Python is clean, simple and has a maths bias so it is perfect as a starter language. As the maths homework gets harder I hope the programming challenges will too. An internal project “Euler” no less.<\/p>\n
So far my eldest seems very keen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Off topic (again) but hey, better than no topic at all. With my own two children (now 7 and 11) growing up fast, I am increasingly interested in what they learn under the heading of ICT at school. As far … Continue reading