News The Royal Society calls for a tenfold increase in computing education funding

...in Germany and the Netherlands, learning how to use a keyboard (as in blind typewriting) is still not obligatory nor offered very often.
We're only about 100 years late.

The stuff Ilearned at School and universitywas noneof the stuff i actually used later (or do you program in Pascal or the likes very ofen?)

 

I'm volunteering all our MP's for one of these computing education classes.

 

But that will always be the case, you can't possibly teach the right technology to primary school kids because it will be at least a decade out of date by the time they hit the jobs market.

Teachin typing, programming and office basics wouldn't hurt though.

 

Yeah, that's why I started with the demand to learn to type.
That's practical without beeing dependant on whatever language is currently en vogue.

Office Basics I learned..... Wordperfect and PC-Calc (yes, I'm old), MS Office wasn't invented back then

 

The logical problem solving skills you pick up while learning Pascal (or whatever other programming language) are universally applicable, so it still has value.
Besides, there are a lot of similarities between different programming languages, so knowing one makes it much easier to learn another at a later point in life.

 

And a copy of Cryptography for Dummies for our esteemed Home Secretary.

 

I didn't get any IT lessons until secondary school aged 11, and even then they were Macs which I've not used since leaving 16 years ago. IT wasn't even offered as a GCSE. Everything I know (not a great deal really, but more than most) is though experience gained as a home PC user.

 

Wow, I even got a GCSE in Computer Science that was writing in BASIC

Amazed, there are so many schools out there not even offering it - are they just all teaching how to pick up phones and deal with angry customers?

 

BASIC was the first, last, and only Computer language that ever made any sense to me

 

More or less.