Sounds familiar to me. I went to school in Mumbai (Bombay), India where they had 'computers' as a subject since 5th grade. They used to take us to a computer tab filled with computers in late 90s, running software from 1980s and let us play Dragon Ball and Pacman on those monochrome monitors. The syllabus used to start with the chapter 'Introduction to Computers', every alternate year and if consisted of repetitive things like "constants and variables". They made us memorize a few QBASIC programs with no clear explanation and we were supposed to 'spit' it out during our practical exams.
The entire environment was to make students believe that computers are boring, hard and the only good use they had was to play video-games.
It took me long to realize the potential of computer programming when I picked it up during my second year of college that was supposed to be based on Electronics Engineering. I find myself lucky to even realize how fun programming can be and it all happened in class when a teacher was pretending to explain us a C program that added two numbers. Majority of my classmates flunked the subject at the end of the term, probably because of the way the subject was presented (mis-represented) to us, but I have been writing programs since that day in 2004.
Adding to that, it is till today that I mostly focus on what I can make a computer do for me rather than to learn theory that makes it all sound more complicated than it is supposed to be.
The entire environment was to make students believe that computers are boring, hard and the only good use they had was to play video-games.
In retrospect every school I've been to, no matter how much they focused on programming, they always lacked the overall "if a computer can do it, why shouldn't it?" attitude, and were way too much focused on building imaginary systems instead of solving actual problems.
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Sounds familiar to me. I went to school in Mumbai (Bombay), India where they had 'computers' as a subject since 5th grade. They used to take us to a computer tab filled with computers in late 90s, running software from 1980s and let us play Dragon Ball and Pacman on those monochrome monitors. The syllabus used to start with the chapter 'Introduction to Computers', every alternate year and if consisted of repetitive things like "constants and variables". They made us memorize a few QBASIC programs with no clear explanation and we were supposed to 'spit' it out during our practical exams.
The entire environment was to make students believe that computers are boring, hard and the only good use they had was to play video-games.
It took me long to realize the potential of computer programming when I picked it up during my second year of college that was supposed to be based on Electronics Engineering. I find myself lucky to even realize how fun programming can be and it all happened in class when a teacher was pretending to explain us a C program that added two numbers. Majority of my classmates flunked the subject at the end of the term, probably because of the way the subject was presented (mis-represented) to us, but I have been writing programs since that day in 2004.
Adding to that, it is till today that I mostly focus on what I can make a computer do for me rather than to learn theory that makes it all sound more complicated than it is supposed to be.
In retrospect every school I've been to, no matter how much they focused on programming, they always lacked the overall "if a computer can do it, why shouldn't it?" attitude, and were way too much focused on building imaginary systems instead of solving actual problems.