exam season bitterness

[devi]

I have marked so many IT practice papers in this last week that my eyes are starting to bleed and my long-standing hatred for the IT syllabus has been stoked up till it burns with the fire of a million suns. I swear they have gone through it and taken out everything that might make students think computers are cool and amazing, and replaced it with endless grey screeds on how employers can profit from computer use, and the Eight Rights and Four Requirements, or hang on it's the Four Rights and Eight Requirements, of the Data Protection Act. No wonder students think people who are enthused about computers are sad. So here you go, my fantasy IT syllabus, concocted a few minutes ago to cheer myself up:


How Computers Think:

• Binary numbers
  
• ASCII code. See how a text file gets turned into a stream of bits!
  
• Programming languages (Write "Hello World"!)
  
• There Are Operating Systems Besides Windows, You Know
  

(In the real IT syllabuses, you never hear any of this stuff.)

The Secret History of the Internet:

• How it got set up
  
• There Was Stuff Before The Web, You Know
  
• There's This Thing Called Telnet (or more secure versions thereof)
  
• Field trips to Usenet, Mono BBS and LambdaMOO
  
• Who's Afraid of JavaScript? Or, how to look at webpage source code without turning white and fainting
  
• Make a Webpage in Notepad, or, Angle Brackets Don't Actually Bite
  

Issues and Debates:

• The Open-Source Debate
  
• Intellectual Property Law and the Hacker Ethic
  
• What "Hacker" Actually Means/Used To Mean (sigh)
  
• Artificial Intelligence (Practical session: chat to ELIZA and her cousins)
  
• Cultures of the Internet and how it's changed our way of life, beyond deadly dull supermarket stock ordering systems ect ect
  
• Online shopping, the Long Tail and how it affects little indie bands/writers/etc
  
• Self-publishing and print-on-demand
  

Look! Look! Ain't That Cool:

• Traceroute and network depiction software. See how your information actually gets to and from Myspace/Bebo/whatever! Watch it bounce off satellites and tunnel under the Atlantic!
  
• Group project: Assemble a working computer from parts! Then partition the hard drive for extra credit.
  

Structured Practical IT Tasks:

• Build a database ABOUT SOMETHING YOU LIKE, eg categorise your vast manga/hip-hop collection. None of this "Mrs Jones is a quantity surveyor…" rubbish.
  
• Build a website, DITTO (though you at the back drawing a bong in MS Paint can stop right now) (No, putting "this is an anti-drugs website" in tiny print at the bottom won't help).
  
• Desktop-publish a book/comic DITTO, using Quark, none of your MS Publisher crap, publish it on Lulu and get your mates and your mum to buy it.
  
• Play with graphics software (which is missing from just about all the existing syllabi, probably because IT'S FUN). Make yourself an icon/banner/whatever for Myspace/Bebo/whatever!
  

Things Definitely Not On The Course:

• Why it's eeeeee-vil to use personal email at work, why it's eeeeee-vil to OMG STEAL MUSIC!, Ways Employers can Save Money through Software Licensing, Why the RIP Act is a Good Thing because Employers Can Monitor what Employees are Doing (Yay!), every bloody question which demands that 15-year-olds imagine they own a company
  

I would do some of the less silly things, but I'm always trying to fit in the whole existing syllabus in not enough time, and anyway about half the students would start foaming at the mouth if I told them they couldn't get marks for it. Sigh.

Though I'm afraid if I was in charge, the exam papers would include questions like "How awesome is Google Earth? Justify your answer with examples (10 marks)."

(Edit: I went to XKCD to link to this ("Pop quiz: Here is a cartoon. Explain the joke") and the current strip was this one. Well, yes, quite.)

Comments

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

I used to teach courses very like those. It was ACE! I used to get the kids to take computers apart to see what their insides looked like, and explain how the internet worked by getting people holding different colours of string, and all sorts of things.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Aw, cool. How did the string thing work? That sounds brilliant. Did some people have to play routers, or what?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Play routers! Mmm... Power tools! ;-)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

For advanced stuff:
Unicode, or "everything we told you about ASCII was wrong"
Data compression, from run-length encoding to Huffman's optimal packing (or, "Why Morse code is good")

For the group project:
How to test which parts aren't working. (Or "When to partition the hard drive. With an Axe")

The problem with building databases is that they very rapidly get more complicated than people want to thing about. Eg, with a music collection, do you want to be able to track solo artists as part of a group? (Sorry, um, it's Hip-hop, isn't it? So the word is probably "Crew"). So that searching for Beatles also finds John Lennon's Imagine, and, worse, finds Wings stuff... at this point people might be able to handle the modelling, but can't write the validation code.

But yes, actually finding a practical application which is relevant to the student is very important: it means they can start to learn about the intended subject (and see the limitations), because they already understand the context, rather than having to learn about Hotel Accomodation first!

As for the anti-drugs website, try http://www.brookes.ac.uk/health/libra

[tackline.livejournal.com]

I believe teaching Unicode to kids would be ruled out by the European Convention on Human Rights thing.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

The Brookes page seems to be ded. Is that the joke?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Nope, it's broken in a very strange way. For example, when it produces the "404 - page not found", if you put "libra" into the search box, it reports the very page that it's just said doesn't exist. I'll get somebody to have a look into it on Monday.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Good syllabus there. But I still want to add one thing and change one thing.

Add: Problem solving with software. Using a toy computer language, write a program to solve a 2D maze (or some similar simple algorithmic task).

Change: "There Are Operating Systems Besides Windows, You Know" ...and historically operating systems used to actually matter. Here's why you shouldn't care anymore. (Insert stuff about browser-as-OS, cross-platform APIs and their relationship to open source and the client-server model of software.)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I had 'algorithms and problem-solving' in there but deleted it. Not sure why now.

[nja.livejournal.com]

I was at one of my schools and the ICT teacher (a bit of an oddball) was running a timed competition to strip a PC down to its major components and reassemble it into working order. Struck me as being a lot more useful than the turtle graphics stuff I saw in a lesson observation a few years earlier, which was allegedly intended to teach programming but seemed to be designed to make computers seem as boring as possible.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

seemed to be designed to make [X] seem as boring as possible

That's my entire school experience summed up in one sentence, there.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Oh lord yes, turtle graphics (which I encountered at 11) put me off computers for years.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Turtle graphics is really good for demonstrating shockwaves.

Decide on the speed of your turtle (eg, speed "1" is the speed of sound).
At the start point of your turtle, draw a circle of radius 10.
Move the turtle forward by it's speed, and draw another circle, this time of radius 9.
Repeat moving the turtle, and drawing circles of decreasing radius.

If the turtles moving at a subsonic speed, the newer wave fronts won't catch up with the old ones. As the speed increases, they get closer, until you get get a sonic boom.

It's really kind of nice :)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I wish my Computer Studies teacher had shown us that. That *would* have grabbed my interest.

What was wrong with the class I did, now that I think about it, was not the turtle graphics but the complete lack of context. The class was called Computer Studies, but instead of getting an overview of how computers worked or even how programming languages worked, we were sat down at the school Acorns on the first day and told to start typing in turtle graphics instructions. No one told me it was like a simplified version of programming, or what it had to do with anything else computers did. I only figured out the point of it ten years later when I started doing programming at university!

Yikes, megacomment to my own housemate. *waves across hall* :)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

timed competition to strip a PC down to its major components and reassemble it into working order

For some reason that makes me think of Full Metal Jacket. "This is my computer. There are many like it but this one is mine..."

[gwennie.livejournal.com]

Hee. This is funny :-)

I have a slow question I am asking only as it is way after the fact, and as we have never met..What is a relational database, by the by? :-)

[erming.livejournal.com]

Hey I wrote a program to do your addition as my final year project back in 96. Twas quite impressive, and got best undergraduate project.

Trickiest bit was producing a 2d random maze that was solvable.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, yes, I can see that. Once you had the maze generator the rest was probably easy!

[erming.livejournal.com]

Well writing an interepreter is a non trivial task aswell as my language had about 30 commands and was recursive :-)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hmm, seems like not much has changed in the last ten years or so (when I did GCSE IT). We did zero programming until A level and learned NOTHING about internal hardware or what those error messages that flash up actually mean - it was all 'design a business card and matching letterhead in MS Works' and the blimmin Data Protection act. We didn't even do relational databases until A-level!

I guess the syllabus writers think that kids who actually have an interest in computers will have probably looked it up on wikipedia already whilst creating a complicated stylesheet for their myspace page.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

There's no programming at AS level now either :/

And at GCSE they have to make databases but don't know the relational stuff, and so can't make meaningful tables that link together. Instead they make hideous flat files stuffed with unrelated information. *shudder*

Flat file databases make the baby Jesus cry.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Ah, in which case, you have the choice. Which is worse:
flat file "databases" in Excel, or
flat file databases in Access.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

flat file "databases" in Excel

Ewww, ewwww. Ewww.

[caescarna.livejournal.com]

You could include a little of relational thinking by going back to Venn diagrams - expressing entity types [Manx cat, Siamese Cat, Moggy, Siberian Tiger, Lion, Panther] and entity supertypes [Domestic Cats, Big Cats] that way, and get the kids to thing about individual things as instances of types of things, differntiated by attributes. You can bring in a little Platonism by talking about ideal types and how everything has attributes that we can all see, and get them to understand attributes by thinking about what makes 1 type of thing different from another.

Entity and Referential integrity is also easily explained. Every instance of stuff you record information about [the things that you're interested in], must be uniquely identifiable. Every unique ID of stuff you're interested in must have a corresponding foriegn key value.

E.g. Every pet has an owner. An owner may have more than 1 pet, but
a pet may not have more than one owner.

When you begin to build rules around data, you then get away from
flat file databases and start identifying and building
relationships between entities. This thinking is at the root of
data modelling and database design.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, this is the sort of thing I do tend to say to the GCSE students, though it isn't on the syllabus, as a sort of sneak preview. The said hideous flat file databases are what I usually come across in coursework they did elsewhere before they came looking for private tuition. They usually *do* know how relational databases work once I'm finished with them!

[caescarna.livejournal.com]

bad me for being 1/2 asleep on a fiday afternoon while reading your posts /blush ;)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Apparently computing in Scotland in the early '90s was way better than anything that's been produced since.

Programming languages (Write "Hello World"!)
Part of my mark was based writing a program to play pick-up sticks, with /strategy/, with vague ASCII art interface.

Build a database ABOUT SOMETHING YOU LIKE
Mine was on guinea pigs, I seem to recall.

Desktop-publish a book/comic DITTO, using Quark, none of your MS Publisher crap, publish it on Lulu and get your mates and your mum to buy it.

We had to build the first page of a book/newspaper/whatever in two different programs and compare them. I can't remember what they were, now, of course.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

play pick-up sticks

Or some really simple game that involved picking up different numbers of sticks, anyway...

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

That, incidentally, was all Standard Grade. I didn't do Higher or A-Level.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Blimey. That's impressive. I didn't do that stuff till the first year of university, for goodness' sake.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

The reason I didn't do Higher was that the computing teacher warned us that it was insanely hard.

Given that we apparently covered stuff at S-Grade that others didn't/don't do until university, I shudder to think!

[tackline.livejournal.com]

I think sudo would make a great name for a cat.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Lots of Unix commands would, now you mention it. But that one's particularly suitable to a cat's personality.

[tackline.livejournal.com]

My father had a cat called cat. And indeed if you called it by its name, it would just sit there waiting for input. Although it dismally failed to repeat anything said further.

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

Argh!

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

Now of course, you made me think of a cat called "cat", which of course is just silly.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

That was the first thing I thought of too :)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

A question: do admissions tutors know how useless this syllabus is?

I would hate to think that it is required for admission to an undergraduate degree in computing: the A-level will screen out all the bright and creative students with an interest in the subject.

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

I can't guarantee about now, but I seem to recall hearing an admissions tutor advising a GCSE student interested in studying CS NOT to do it... Maths mandatory, IT deprecated.

[nja.livejournal.com]

Matthew Huntbach (http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~mmh/) used to frequently make that point on various education newsgroups a few years ago. He'd found that success on a CS course correlated strongly with A-level maths score, and not with anything else (we find much the same with Engineering and A-level maths).

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Come come, if the establishment syllabus was interesting, the only way we'd be able to rebel would be by *being boring*, and that'd REALLY take the fun out of everything.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

I love your brain and wish to sponsor it in the Beautiful Brains Pageant.

Issues and Debates:

I think I'd also want to include Social Networking/Online Communities. I know we won't be able to completely dispel this, but it may help in mitigating the effects.

Things Definitely Not On The Course:



Wait, seriously? These are things you have to teach? I mean... Ethics in Computing is good and all, but that's just patronizing! And utterly not helpful. All this is practically *designed* to make people resent computing. Yuck.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's all like "so you're an employer, here's how to control your employees' use of IT in order to keep from wasting money". I don't understand it either.

And yes, I was kind of including the former bit in "cultures of Internet". How about "how not to be a fvckwad online"?