I taught Computer Science in high schools for the last 2 years; now I'm learning to code, Ask Me Anything!

Comments

[Ross Henderson]

Wayhey, another UK guy!

What are your thoughts on the National Curriculum and whether it stays up-to-date with emerging and important technologies?

This was about 10 years ago, but my I.T. education was horrific; it was Excel and nothing else.

[Mr.I]

Wooo! Safety in numbers :P

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This was about 10 years ago, but my I.T. education was horrific; it was Excel and nothing else. - This is so reminiscent of my education too!

In a nutshell: the curriculum has come a long way (since our days) and is heading in the right direction -- the government released a statement that money (£84m) is being put into training 8,000 teachers, which should really help with the delivery!

Ohhh and OOP has been introduced to the 16-18-year-olds now, so things like functional programming should only be... say... a decade away ;)

[Stargator]

What language are you thinking about to use as you learn?

[Mr.I]

Hi Stargazer,

My main focus is React. I'm committing to a minimum of 30 minutes each day, which often turns into hours :)
I'm finding it tricky piecing together everything, especially trying to separate code so it's not a complete mess!

Any tips or advice? Or anything I can help with?

[Ben Halpern]

Hmm I wouldn’t think of JS frameworks as ckmputer science, is this more of a software development course than CS specifically?

Definitely interesting either way!

[Mr.I]

When I was teaching, it was to the UK national curriculum. The students used Python as the main language because the syntax is so readable!

I'm personally learning React (as a way of learning JavaScript more deeply), albeit it quite slowly!

[Ben Halpern]

Where are you based? Is this course typical in your area?

[Mr.I]

I'm based in the UK, London. There are a few courses mostly taught by either FireTechCamp or General Assembly (I believe both of which are over in the states too!).

However, UK schools teach to a curriculum, in which there are different boards but most of the content is similar. One of the sections looks like:

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2.2 Programming techniques

• the use of variables, constants, operators, inputs, outputs and assignments
• the use of the three basic programming constructs used to control the flow of a program:
  • sequence
  • selection
  • iteration (count and condition controlled loops)


• the use of basic string manipulation


• the use of basic file handling operations:
  • open
  • read
  • write
  • close


• the use of records to store data


• the use of SQL to search for data


• the use of arrays (or equivalent) when solving problems, including both one and two dimensional arrays


• how to use sub programs (functions and procedures) to produce structured code


• the use of data types:
  • integer
  • real
  • Boolean
  • character and string
  • casting


• the common arithmetic operators


• the common Boolean operators.

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