[Yr11 Information Technology] Re: Unit 2 Outcome 1:Programming

[Steven Bird]

"Roland Gesthuizen" <rgesthuizen at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of my VCE students won an IT scholarship and returned to school after a
> January University summer camp with some experience programming in Python
> and some very good impressions about how easy it was to learn and use.
> During the camp, her team built a web crawling Internet robot and a computer
> game then had a quick look at VPython.

I wonder if this was the National Computer Science School in Sydney
[1].  I went to this in 2006 and thought it was brilliant.  I
interviewed many of the students and wrote up a trip report for the
VITTA newsletter [2].  There's a more detailed discussion of this
particular approach to teaching programming in a paper called
"Building a Search Engine to Drive Problem-Based Learning" [3].

> From what I can Google, there are ooodles of resources, tutorials and
> training videos out there. Free to download and works on Windows and
> Unix/Linux/MacOSX systems. Would love to learn it myself beyond just typing
> "hello world". :-)

Sydney uni runs a course for teachers who want to learn Python [4].
If there's local interest I can see if we can run the same course at
Melbourne Uni later this year.

[1] http://www.ncss.edu.au/
[2] http://www.vitta.org.au/pubs/infonet/index.php?edition=21
[3] http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00001618/
[4] http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/schools_teachers/teach_py.shtml

"Kevork Krozian" <Kroset at novell1.fhc.vic.edu.au> wrote:
> [...] with the advent of the VCE in 1990 the idea was that we are
> not only teaching students to prepare for tertiary courses but to also
> have a breadth of knowledge not restricted to excelling simply for
> tertiary selection.

Right, and I wasn't advocating Python because it would help with
university selection.  In fact, Melbourne (and probably other tertiary
institutions) do not require VCE IT for our IT-related courses.

I sense there is insufficient communication between IT educators
across the secondary/tertiary divide.  As anecdotal evidence, I
recently overheard the following exchange:

Q: What should be done differently for students who have completed VCE IT?
A: Offer them remedial classes.

This is a (misdirected and offensive) complaint about the secondary
curriculum, but it is also evidence for a purist attitude that is
happily on the way out.

Our new curriculum will be problem-driven not language-driven, and
will work for students who have previous IT experience ranging from
limited to extensive.  Previous Python experience will be largely
irrelevant to success in our new first year subjects
[http://www.informatics.unimelb.edu.au/].

> In view of or even despite the above, do you have a strong opinion
> either way as to what secondary schools should be teaching in terms of
>
>    1. The IT course content in general
>    2. The programming languages taught at each year level
>    3. The degree of difficulty students should achieve at each year level
>    4. Do they need ANY IT before they come to you
>    5. What prerequisite would you like to set for Uni candidates coming
> to your course ?
>    6. Is there anything you wish they could "unlearn" before they start
> your course ?

These are great questions and mostly too big to tackle properly here.
It would be great to have a face-to-face forum for discussing the
larger issues with the teaching and learning of IT, issues that
concern both sides equally.  Note that we continually wrestle with
your questions 1-3 in our undergraduate degree.

Since you asked, here's some personal concerns with the secondary IT
curriculum, particularly in the area of programming.  As with the
earlier anecdote, I'm sharing this not because it is necessarily an
accurate and fair assessment of the curriculum, but because it is a
fairly typical perception of the curriculum amongst the handful of
tertiary IT educators I've spoken to, perceptions which may need to be
corrected.  Note that these comments represent my opinion only, and
not that of my employer. :-)

Programming: the emphasis on programming-in-the-large (incl SDLC) when
students haven't necessarily mastered programming-in-the-small (e.g.
coding up a simple algorithm, basic principles of program design).

Science: the coverage of programming skills with limited attention to
underlying principles, e.g. I've watched secondary students copy and
paste php/mysql "codes" from the web into their program without
understanding what it does; you might call this "voodoo programming".

Projects: the nature of student project work depends heavily on the
specialist knowledge of the individual teacher to a greater extent
than is typical in other disciplines, and this knowledge varies
greatly between teachers; I know VITTA is doing a great job with
in-service training but wonder if even more could be done.

Thanks for getting this far, and I look forward to our further discussions...

Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/