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.

[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

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[tackline.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.