Comments on: The effect of education on the software market

By: Maddles

Maddles — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 06:06:20 +0000

I experienced something similar last year and the year before. I’m in Year 11 this year btw. Anyway, back in 2005 my school began to offer the IT subject a little earlier, in Year 9.

I switched from Design to do it. We learnt how to make games in Game Maker (actually quite a good intro to the basics of how a program works) and how to make websites in Dreamweaver. It was alright. I’d already used Game Maker before so in the end I made the most advanced game (a platformer in the style of Mario), though a mate of mine made a game that could have given me a run if he’d had another 2 weeks to perfect it. I hated using Dreamweaver.

Then last year we learnt how to make databases in Access (using Wizards for some things), make an acceleration calculator in Flash (very easy, too bad I’ve forgotten how I did it), and how to use spreadsheets in Excel.

What I hated was that we didn’t learn anything outside of Microsoft, Macromedia (now Adobe of course), or Game Maker. This isn’t a fault in the teacher, no way. He’s into Linux, has a Mac and maintains the infrastructure of the school. It’s just what the Education Department wants. Information Technology means knowing how to use Flash and spreadsheets and making websites. What about open source stuff? What about teaching us how to actually write programs in a popular and more powerful language than ActionScript.

We couldn’t do IT his year. It’s a year long course and only five people said they were interested.

By: EduAd "Technology" - The Apple Blog Community

EduAd "Technology" - The Apple Blog Community — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 03:52:14 +0000

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By: Biappi

Biappi — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:56:33 +0000

Yeah, I had disappointing experiences too with CS-euducation in Italy…
In the 5 years of high school we had only 10 /hours/ of CS, instead of 2 hours per week as the curriculum states, because the teachers did not know what they was trying to teach!
The funniest (or scariest…) thing was a “Quesito della Susi”, a logic quiz featured in an Italian crossword magazine (!), as an home assignment.
And, beacuse it can always get worse, the teacher in the first C++ programming course i attended in university stated “A boolean value can hold a “True” or “False” information, 0 for True and 1 for False”. I ran away screaming :P.