Please help our kids help our future

Britain is being left behind by many countries on the technological side of things - most new start-ups are from the US for example, including all the big social networking sites.

Why? Because they have taken to technology and programming much more than us. Please help by signing this official gov.uk petition to get our govt to introduce coding at a younger age in British schools - not only will it help kids have a chance of a brighter future but will be better for our own economy too

https://submissions.epetitions.direc...etitions/15081

Thanks in advance for your time! Your name/details on official gov.uk petitions are never made public.

Sorrry Azz but year 5 would be a nightmare! As a year 5 teacher( at times) I can speak from experience that a lot of children are still dealing with literacy and numeracy and other vitals .With the introduction of virtual learning environments the children are becoming more skilled but there is only so much time a 9/10 year old has in one week to fit everything they have to learn.

You would also be relying on primary schools to be able to employ a specialist teacher to cover such a curriculum.We must remember that at that stage in education the children are still taught by one class teacher.under current budgetary restraints this would be virtually impossible.

Possibly in year 7 once they reach High School but year 5 is too young in my opinion.

I was under the (Possibly mistaken) impression that coding didn't get taught at any point! From what I can gather, school IT is all about producing users not developers. Oh, I could rant for ages on this topic!

Hi Fudge, it's great we have a year 5 teacher here - hope you won't mind if I pick your brains

What are year 5 pupils taught altogether? How much time is devoted to each topic?

Btw, the basics of programming are actually very simple, eg:

1 + 2
(Which would give you the answer of 3)

"Hello student, " + "what is your name?"
(Which would join up both sentences and output: Hello student, what is your name?)

You can then put things in 'containers' (what we call variables) so the above example could be set like this:

greeting = "Hello student, "
question = "what is your name?"

And then called like this:

greeting + question

Which would output:

Hello student, what is your name?

Just found this: http://kidsruby.com/about
Maybe you could pilot it in lunch breaks or something

10 print "Hello World"
20 goto 10



BTW, there's a related post on Slashdot. http://developers.slashdot.org/story...omputer-Coding

Azz

Not a full time teacher but supply so don't know the full breakdown of subject times etc and this will also vary form school to school.

The main new thrust of IT in many primary schools at the moment is teaching children to create their own web-pages/sites etc.......not sure there would be much time to fit much coding into the 45 minutes that our kids get these days!

If you fancy some reading the following link gives you the information on what children learn at year 5.....enjoy!

http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-st...cts/index.aspx

Ok a non ironic point of view with no humor or sarcasm.
I am not a teacher but my son is home educated. He is 12 and has completed his GCSE’s and the first year of a math’s degree, so I feel I know a bit about teaching.

Why would you want to include any programming/ coding into the school curriculum, it’s the sort of thing that people learn about because they are interested, if everybody could do it you would have more coders than users.
Mischief makers like myself would be hacking and crashing your website rather than typing rubbish jokes in the wrong place.
If everybody could do what you can, the internet would be chaos.
Just my opinion

The thing is computer use is so widespread and fundamental to our daily lives that having as many people as possible with real IT skills and not just MS Office use is going to become increasingly important. Maybe in a few years it'll be the 3 r's ad IT too!

The problem facing a lot of children is being able to read and write, not programme, approximately 10% of children leave school unable to do those simple things. I doubt that many leave school unable to play computer games or handle an ipad or whatever the current rage is. Being taught how to programme a computer using keys and short cut language rather than being taught how to write, could lend itself to more rather than fewer illiterates leaving school.
I'd rather my vet had read all of his text books, attended all of the relevant lectures, passed his exams with a first and was able to talk rather than grunt, than that he or she could programme a computer.

That kind of attitude to IT/computer use in general worries me. COMPUTERS ARE A HUGE PART OF EVERYONE'S DAILY LIVES THESE DAYS! Saying you're not interested and can't be bothered to learn or that knowing how computers work isn't important is BS in my opinion. Look at how much pretty much 90% of the population relies on technology and then justify your uninterested position.