Tomorrow, I'm going to be looking at posting my mamoth post covering a complete set of instructions to install a virtualized copy of Ubuntu into VMWare player and setting up, as well as actually using Subversion, on that as a server... It a huge post which has taken several evenings of my time to create over the last week and a half, it contains over 90 individual images stepping you through the process... So watch out for that Tomorrow...
Today though I want to talk to you about Coding in Schools, there is much hype about the Raspberry Pi, about it showing kids how to code again, like on the BBC Micro all those years ago. I actually came to my junior school in 1985 slightly after the bust period in that computer boom. By the time I had left in 1989 I had played on the BBC Micro a few games, learned to roughly program the turtle to draw a shape on the floor and to see the first Archemedies model computer be bought by the school.
At home I always had slightly better technology, I had a Commodore with its brand of Basic, which I did knock up a few programs on and did spend time learning to type with. Also, I always had a fascination with my Mum's type writer, and being quite young had no real creativity, or rather I didn't know I was allowed to just make stuff up, so I would type out passages from books we had around me, Thomas the Tank engine being a favourite.
All this lead to my pretty much ignoring IT as a GCSE topic, I took one look at the syllabus and also had heard a lot about the teacher being prosecuted for touching a lass up in another class, and pretty much passed on that and went onto fail French in spectacular style.
When I went to look for my A-Levels though in 1994 there was a whole new generation of machines in full swing, 16bit computing was slowly giving way to 32bit, Intel had released the 80486 and the dancing men in clean room suits of many colours were on the tele... So, along with Chemistry and Biology I opted to take Computing...
Now, in 1994, I walked into a class to learn computing and I immediately fell in love with the idea that I could type a few commands into this computer and get it to do what I wanted. The interface (Microsoft DOS) was well behind what I had at home (GEM on TOS). But this more primitive low level view of the machine let me fall in love with programming it... Raspberry Pi might very well do the same, its main purpose is to be cheap, the software its presenting could be virtualised as a copy of Linux on any Desktop PC, so no matter how many PC's a school has invested in now all the pupils could be taught on a common virtual platform to use the same virtual software and then as they perhaps get Pi's they can switch to them and have a head start... All well and good...
But, often, pupils coming to programming now are far too used to the GUI, far too used to pretty interfaces and they're not interested in algorithms. I've fallen foul of this myself, I spend more time making a program look the part than actually be the part.
Spin back a couple of days to my post about programming Pascal on the Atari ST. At first I saw it as a real pain in the bum to get that system up and running and programming and it was slow to compile and impossible to effectively debug... But... I had the raw power over the machine, I was in charge, my program was all it had to contend with, there was no worry about Windows kicking in, or timing problems with my program being removed from the CPU, or the virus scanner taking over and ruining performance... It was very raw, very basic... very simple...
I'm yet to have a proper good look at the pi, but if it can nail this back to basics in the hardware as well as the price it may well be onto a winner to produce a new genertion of good programmers... Better than me and all my lazy, lax, short cut taking ways I hope...
No comments:
Post a Comment