back to article BBC: We're going to slip CODING into kids' TV

The BBC now has a policy of attaching an educational theme to each year that will be rammed into as many programmes as possible and will run across all of its channels and websites. 2014 was the centenary of WWI, as anyone with functioning sensory organs knows, and Auntie Beeb has decreed that in 2015, we will learn to code, …

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  1. Christian Berger

    I'm all for teaching children how to program...

    it's an essential part of being a politically mature member of society as more and more issues are related to data processing....

    ... but please don't torture kids with C++

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm all for teaching children how to program...

      "it's an essential part of being a politically mature member of society as more and more issues are related to data processing...."

      Not it isn't, anymore than understanding how a steam engine worked was an essential part of being a member of victorian society. People being able to use tools is what matters, not being able to explain their workings or construct them which always has been and always will be the preserve of specialists. Twas ever thus even back in the days of flint knapping.

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: I'm all for teaching children how to program...

        "Not it isn't, anymore than understanding how a steam engine worked was an essential part of being a member of victorian society."

        Actually if people in a victorian society understood as little about steam engines as people understand today about computers, it would have been a problem.

        I mean there are people out there who know so little about computers they believe voting computers can somehow be made to conform with democratic standards. There are people out there who believe that computer can somehow prevent unauthorized copying of data they show to the user. The problem is that such insane ideas get put into laws and contracts... with lots of negative side effects for all of us.

        Today more than ever we actually cut of children from the ability to learn about computing. If you bought a computer in the 1980s, chances were that it booted up with a BASIC interpreter... today you need to root most mobile phones to even get to the shell.

        The smallest of the issues arising from that will be a certain "brain drain", you will get less and less people who get into IT and understand what they are doing. This will, on the long term, mean worse and worse IT.

        If we don't start educating young people now, there will be no one left to design, build and maintain the exoskeleton you need to get around when you are old. We already have one lost generation.

        1. tony2heads
          Gimp

          @Christian Berger

          What about SL4A, qpython and ruboto for your android?

          Learning some scripting language on a phone is quite possible

    2. Refugee from Windows

      Re: I'm all for teaching children how to program...

      Not C++, just a little Scratch and some Python maybe. Hmm, not blowing raspberries at this one.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm all for teaching children how to program...

      Not all children, probably very few, will be truly interested in programming.

      C, for all the possibilities of going wrong, is great procedural language to start with and really teaches people PAY ATTENTION to what they are doing.

      C++ is a wonderful OOP language with again the same stipulation, PAY ATTENTION to what you are doing.

      They are, perhaps, the hard languages, on the one hand but just a unlimited in possibilities on the other.

      So, one or two semesters of C and the rest mostly in C++.

      Once, people understand the two above the rest will largely come more easily.

    4. MrXavia
      Holmes

      Re: I'm all for teaching children how to program...

      "it's an essential part of being a politically mature member of society as more and more issues are related to data processing...."

      I disagree, the last thing we want is every user behind a keyboard thinking they can 'program' a solution because they took a GCSE in IT and did some programming... that would cause more mess than anything, users cause enough problems with just excel and how to do macros they learned in school....

      "but please don't torture kids with C++"

      I agree, if we are to teach programming, lets teach the techniques, not the code....

      Those who want to learn will make the effort and take further classes in the subject...

      I.E. lets use something akin to lego mindstorms 'visual' programming language, my 7 year old understands that, and I am using it to teach him the principles of programming..

  2. Amorous Cowherder
    Happy

    Oh for the late Iain McNaught Davis, he'd have us all programming again in a jiffy!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Amorous Cowherder

      "Oh for the late Iain McNaught Davis, he'd have us all programming again in a jiffy!"

      Indeed. Though I think the article was a bit hard on Click. They do cover some pretty meaty topics occasionally. At any rate, its far superior to the Gadget Show which seems to be aimed at whacked out 15 year olds with a 60 second attention span and presented by a bunch of sad Kidults - especially Jason Bradbury with his "zany skater geek" persona. Which is bit pathetic for a man pushing 50.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Truth4u

        Re: @Amorous Cowherder

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jason_Bradbury.jpg

        In this photo he looks like a plausible boiler mechanic, but I wouldn't let him into my home.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Don't forget his sidekick

      Chris Serle

      1. Anonymous Custard

        Re: Don't forget his sidekick

        Or Fred Harris, or even "Freff".

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Don't forget his sidekick

        Whenever I think of Chris Serle, I remember this

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SehPOYKmRI4

        In our house, to 'Chris Serle' is still a verb meaning to deliberately and blatantly do something extremely badly and ineptly so as to make it look difficult or impossible, normally to reinforce a petty point.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The problem is

    that getting a computer to do what you want it to to is contra-indicated for life in the society that the government wants you to live in.

    1. king of foo

      #slurpsvictorygin

      Existing geeks don't make good cyber warriors; we are too old and opinionated - and we remember a world before CCTV and intrusive surveillance. We are too much like Winston.

      Enter the new hip young naive pliable cyber kids who don't "get" our point of view, and probably never will.

      I imagine that's the government thinking anyway.

      Dangerous...

  4. dogged

    Oh crap.

    My lad's 17 months old and a bugger for experimenting with things. He experimented with dribbling down the headphone jack on my phone, now that doesn't work. He experimented with sticking chewed toast into the charging port on 'erself's macbook Air - thank you, home contents insurance.

    Now they're going to encourage him to rain happy enthusiastic destruction on daddy's workstation?

    That does it. Nina and her chatty Neurons are banned in our house as of right bloody now.

    1. NumptyScrub

      Re: Oh crap.

      Small children have been happily destroying important and/or expensive things since the invention of small children. I was an utter nightmare once I worked out what screwdrivers did ^^;

      The only winning move is to put everything important out of reach (high shelves, or preferably locked up in a verboten area like the "study") until some semblance of "adherence to rules" (aka trustworthiness) emerges as they get older. This varies by child, so you'll have to make your own judgement call there.

      17mo is definitely too young to be trusted with kit that isn't at least IP57 certified, drool gets everywhere ;)

      1. DiViDeD

        Re: Oh crap.

        My eldest boy was around 3 when he discovered he could 'share' his big sister's fruit pastilles with daddy's (very expensive!) motorised load cassette deck. Place it in the tray, press down, and the deck 'ate' it and opened it's gob for another.

        Wll the thing about leccytronics in those days was they got hot. And the thing about fruit pastilles when they get hot is ... the tray comes back empty. He was delighted that he managed tp get it to eat a whole tube before the screaming started.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Childcatcher

          Re: Oh crap.

          My son was about two when I caught him taking a live socket apart using my electric screw driver, and the BED apart with a socket wrench.

          I caught my daughter dragging my large drill/driver around and trying it out on sockets at NINE MONTHS!!

          She is nineteen months now, and has already discovered a keyboard short-cut to delete all my bookmarks, as well as a number of other weird effects.

          Oh, and randomly pushed number on mummies iPhone called someone in CANADA!!

          (She hasnt figured out the unlock on my Android phone .....yet)

          Anyway, I look forwards to Old Jack hacking the NSA from the safety of the Rainbow, or Makka Pakka writing a spreadsheet for his stone collection.

          1. MrXavia
            Facepalm

            Re: Oh crap.

            ummm maybe you should keep tools far away from them?

            I sympathise with the phone thing though... and don't worry, I am sure the 19 month old will learn how to unlock your phone soon, I think mine was 2 when he started watching me unlock mine and copied me...

            the thing with infants, they learn the pattern your hand does, NOT the code, so they figure it out faster than an adult without a direct line of sight.... although you only have to unlock your phone 2 or 3 times with the kid on your lap...

          2. TwistUrCapBack
            Coffee/keyboard

            Re: Oh crap.

            "Makka Pakka writing a spreadsheet for his stone collection"

            QUALITY !! :)

      2. soldinio

        Re: Oh crap.

        As soon as my 2 year old could reach the keyboard he started creating havoc on my home desktop. I turned on the PC one day to get the error message that "boot_mgr is missing". This struck me as odd as it was there the night before, oh well it was Vista so it may have got lost and/or corrupted somewhere. 'Found' a windows recovery disk and was surprised to be greeted with the report that everything was fine. After days of slowly going mental, I finally worked out that my little darling had hit the on button then flapped at the keyboard - and somehow fluked the sequence to re-program my bios so it was booting from the wrong hard drive.

        I dread to think what he will destroy once he has a little education :)

      3. DiViDeD

        Re: Oh crap.

        "The only winning move is to put everything important out of reach"

        The initiative I found most useful was, believe it or not, to turn the door handles to certain rooms upside down. It meant, until they were 4 or 5, even if they had worked out what I'd done, they weren't tall enough to get the handle to the top of its swing.

        Led to a few 'senior' moments on the part of their mother and I as we tried to work out what was wrong with the door, mind.

        On a related door handly note, whose bloody stupid idea was it that locking doors (bathroom, toilet) should be easy to open from the OUTSIDE? The first time my daughter walked in on me in mid sh*t was a terrifying and traumatic experience (for me, that is - she seemed to regard it as a terribly clever trick)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

    was working with html. Maybe useful, but hardly "coding"...

    1. captain veg Silver badge

      Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

      It certainly is coding, assuming that you're doing it in some kind of text editor, but it isn't programming. The article alludes to fact that there is a difference.

      -A.

    2. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

      Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

      Just the use of the word "Coding" shows the problem. Coding is what you were doing way back when you looked up hexadecimal machine-code instructions to turn your assembly-language into executable binary. I haven't "coded" since 1990...

      ... but I've been programming for thirty years. Programming is about finding ways to make a computer do laborious tasks so that people don't have to.

      As for the lack of girls in IT, any woman I've spoken to about this has given me the same answer: "hacker" culture. It's about as far from what a 16-year-old girl would think is "cool" as you can get, and it's at age 16 that most kids make their career choice.

      It doesn't matter that it grossly misrepresents the vast majority of well-rounded, personable, friendly people who work in IT and Programming - the perception remains that we're a bunch of sullen, asocial freaks with personal hygiene issues, borderline paranoia and a superiority complex.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

        If the problem is media stereotypes then we can presumably interest girls in 'coding' by including pink unicorns and sparkly vampires?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

        Yet in the 1960s there was a high proportion of women in the computer industry doing computer programming. It was only after companies started mandating Computer Science graduates that the industry shifted to a male predominance. As a junior support programmer on an EEC KDF9 I shared an office with three women who were senior to me. Even the System 4 system programming teams included a large number of women.

        1. xerocred

          Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

          There is a youtube video from a Norwegian guy called the "gender equality paradox" that (I think) goes someway to explain the dearth of females in computer/engineering and their dominance in other subjects.

          Basically as society gets more equal people follow what they would like to do rather than what career might offer the best job prospects. This also gives a plausible reason why the % is higher in those countries where gender equality is not so high.

          More importantly than getting girls to do subjects they may not be interested in, I believe we should be really addressing why girls make up 60% of eu and us graduates. If we are really equal then 50% more girls graduating than boys is the bigger problem.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

            Actually that makes sense, during the war my Mum (along with a lot of girls in her generation) was welding Bren gun magazines in a factory to support the war effort, strangely as soon as the war ended she dropped welding from her list of possible career choices.

    3. Kubla Cant

      Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

      ...html. Maybe useful, but hardly "coding"

      I know what you mean, but HTML counts as getting a computer to do stuff and trying to understand why it's not doing what you expected, which is an important first step. Declarative programming, rather than procedural, but not inadmissable on that basis.

      The danger is that HTML takes over and the whole project becomes as vacuous as the MS Office based curriculum of the past.

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

        HTML may not be programming but CSS certainly is and by the time you've added SVG and JavaScript I think you are well past what you could expect junior school kids to cope with.

        Based on most of the web-sites that I encounter, you are well past what the average "web developer" can cope with. (Web-devs who actually have a clue must really hate the average member of their profession.)

      2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

        "but HTML counts as getting a computer to do stuff"

        By that argument, marking up a document in MSWord is coding.

        1. Diogenes

          Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

          I am trying something different with a year 9 class in our Web create unit -

          step 1. they build the site in HTML & CSS

          step 2. they make the site responsive

          step 3. add a little jquerymobile (and phonegap) magic and get them to minimally recode the site as an app

          step 4. take that app and really modify it.

          HTML, and especially HTML5 can be used to learn structure in a way word doesn't I have noticed my year 9s are thinking harder about the semantic structure of their sites since I flipped over to HTML5 & coupled with CSS they are making sound logical structural choices.We are currently at step 2 and they are having to make logical choices (introducing decisions)

          1. Diogenes

            Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

            And further to my previous comment (and only applies if hand coding) and in response to the maligning of html as not "real" programming) it is useful for teaching some underlying concepts in the most painless way I can imagine...

            HTML/CSS/JS is teaching the separation of presentation & content that becomes useful when trying to code a "proper" app using Eclipse/XCode/C#+WPF

            It gets them used to the fact computers are fussy about syntax and spelling eg <p clas="fred" will never work (Brackets highlights unclosed tags which introduces the concept of a compiler error - I call it the pink mark of shame) and that using the right sort of delimiter eg < vs { vs ( in the right place is important (and so is closing them ) and needing " at the start and end of specific strings, and forgetting semi colons will cause a world of hurt in CSS.

            There is a very limited set of commands (120 tags in html - most people can get away with only remembering about 24 ditto properties in CSS) as opposed to a humungous api

            There is virtually instant feedback (especially Brackets+Chrome combination)

            Although this is not the brightest group I have ever had we are working our way through the unit faster and with deeper understanding.Its wonderful seeing the "aha" when somebody finally gets the concept of if-else if - else as we are currently putting media queries in the CSS

            1. oolor

              Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

              @Diogenes:

              Sound pretty cool. My only question is, why in the age of HTML5 would you not just do straight JavaScript from the beginning? The DOM interaction that many JS libraries abstract are actually the best learning opportunities. Single thread operations along with event handling can lead to some interesting logic practice.

              Regardless, I hope you find time to incorporate plain JS into the curriculum (if you already are, awesome).

              1. Diogenes

                Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

                @oolor

                Just getting them used to the stuff I describe in my 2nd post is hard enough - I am really trying hard not to scare off the girls in the class who think programming is icky. (Think of the pot being slowly brought to the boil so the frog doesn't notice :-) ). I will be doing a "proper" software development unit with them next year and take what I am covering with them now into the realms of "pure" javascript to create simple games on the canvas and really start logic and algorithm design then.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

          "By that argument, marking up a document in MSWord is coding."

          To be fair, he did specify "in a text editor", so doing markup, auto-insertion of boiler-plate text based in selection of conditions and interfacing to a mailing list in MSWord for DOS on a text-only screen (or WordStar, or WordPerfect, is also pretty close to "coding".

          pointy clicky GUI document formatting in MSWord for Windows is not coding, but VBScripting a complex template/form might be.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

            The absolute worst thing about the breakfast tv spot was the reporter, she was dumbing down to such an embarrassing degree it was painful, stuff like "we're not talking about what you see on the screen , but the CODE (extra emphasis) behind it which makes the program run", sigh, most adults can understand that programs contain code, there's no need to talk to people like they are congenitally stupid or a politician.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Facepalm

              Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

              I think you are VASTLY under-estimating the average level of stupidity.

              Please remember that the national Lottery have TWICE had to remove a series of scratch cards because too many people did not know that MINUS 18C is less than MINUS 16C when comparing temperatures.

              I also know of someone who managed to force Sky into cancelling their internet service because the routers WiFi broadcast did not transfer the data at the FULL 300Mbps speed (they only had a "G" spec card in the PC).

              1. Kubla Cant
                Headmaster

                Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

                @Ian Emery: too many people did not know that MINUS 18C is less than MINUS 16C when comparing temperatures

                Minus 18 degrees Celsius may be colder than minus 16 degrees Celsius, but "less than" implies magnitude, in which case the smaller value (16) is the lesser. If the National Lottery phrased its question as vaguely as your posting, I'm not surprised it had to withdraw the scratchcards.

          2. DropBear
            Stop

            Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

            To be fair, he did specify "in a text editor"...

            NO. Perhaps some people define "coding" (ugh, that word...) as hammering away at letters on a keyboard, but I prefer to define an activity by its result, not by the means employed to achieve it; marking up a text by clicking buttons is no more different from doing it by typing lots of <> than creating a program fitting coloured blocks together in Scratch is different from entering it in C. As far as I'm concerned, the former is simply "designing a layout" (dynamic content / javascript / CGI etc. are a different matter, but that's not what you're going to teach to a beginner is it...), while the latter is "learning about decision making". Technically, writing "2" down as "0x0010" is "coding" too, but in my book both coding and programming are defined as "instructing a machine how to perform task X" - and no, that's not the same as "telling a machine to perform task X by writing <this is X>hello<end of X>".

            1. lurker

              Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

              @DropBear

              Coding is the act of writing anything which is a code, that's pretty simple, and not really up for debate, just go and read a dictionary.

              HTML is a form of code.

              Therefore, writing HTML, is coding.

              Actually the mistake is mis-using the word 'coding' when what is meant is 'programming'. Coding is writing in code (and therfore coding is in fact an extremely accurate term for writing HTML) whereas I would define programming to be the use of algorithms to complete a task. Unfortunately programmers have taken to describing themselves as 'coders' (I'm sure I've done so myself on occasion) which is where the confusion has arisen.

    4. lurker

      Re: The kid I saw on the BBC News this morning...

      Look up the definition of the word 'code', please. HTML is a code, as are all programming languages, as is morse code, as is pig latin. So working in it is coding. As a programmer myself, I get tired of snotty programmers sneering at HTML.

      Is it a complex code? Actually, it can be, when you throw CSS and the DOM into the mix. Is it 'computer programming' such as the old farts among us understood it 20 years ago? No, not really, but it IS coding.

  6. Anonymous Custard
    Childcatcher

    Foundations

    It's a good and noble idea in theory, but it strikes me as missing two fundamental foundation parts.

    Firstly and most importantly would it not be better actually train the teachers first before just chucking in a whole new curriculum with coding in it? It's well known that a great and inspirational teacher who knows their stuff can work wonders, but the mirror is also true and one who doesn't know or care can wreck any possible interest in the subject forever.

    Secondly before the kids are taught to program, wouldn't it be better to introduce the underlying stuff like logical thinking and planning? I recall from eons past when I was at school we were always taught to plan all the stuff out first before going near a computer, and it generally worked much better that way than freeform typing. But now of course everyone in the popular media is painting the image of expecting 10 year olds to come home and program Pi's before teatime and tablet apps that will be at the top of the app store charts by Christmas.

    As the father of bright 10 year and 8 year old girls I can see this being an area for some more parental support and extra education where I can.

    1. Kubla Cant

      Re: Foundations

      we were always taught to plan all the stuff out first before going near a computer, and it generally worked much better that way than freeform typing

      I'm sorry, I have to disagree. I suspect that the whole "turn off the screen and get out a pencil and paper" method was originally advocated before IDEs which allowed rapid exploration and experimentation. I'm sure most kids would find it a turn-off. What are they going to put on the paper? UML?

      That's not to suggest that the paper approach isn't valid in professional development (though in 30 years' experience, I've seen little of it going on). But interest has to come first - discipline can follow.

      1. BlueGreen

        Re: Foundations

        > But interest has to come first - discipline can follow.

        absolutely agree. If any latent interest is killed, the subject's dead. If you tease that interest you can lead them to new places.

        The huge advantage of computers IMO is that it's the essential tool to bring maths alive - to take abstractions and turn them into something the kid can see onscreen.

        I don't think that coding is actually that important at all, I think maths *is*, and computers can bring them to it better than when I was at school. At least make it less of a dull, bloodless chore - and I had some genuiniely good maths teachers.

        Problem is, maths' abstraction is its profound strength but, pedagogically, its weakness.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Foundations

        "I suspect that the whole "turn off the screen and get out a pencil and paper" method was originally advocated before IDEs which allowed rapid exploration and experimentation."

        The problem with code which is built that way is that it's crap - and no amount of gilding will polish that particular turd.

        Keep the exploration and experiementation in the lab. Pencil and paper or other structured approaches are there for the same reason that we don't build bridges by the method of sticking one's thumb out front and gauging measurements that way.

        Having said that. Coding is the perfect way to start and that old favourite for kids - LOGO - is just as relevant to learning now as it was 30 years ago.

    2. king of foo

      Re: Foundations

      TEACHERS TEACHERS TEACHERS.

      You're absolutely right. Most teachers can't tell their XP from their w7 from their ms office, and rightly so. Teachers need to have a solid understanding first, and I'd say this is a completely different kettle of fish from, say, teaching kids about WW2.

      Planning? Ugh. Boring. Way to suck all the fun out of coding/programming. The best way to learn is to fail, to fail BIG, not to temporarily absorb data into your brain for the purposes of passing tests/exams, then promptly forgetting all but the least useful bits.

      However, I think what you say there also makes a lot of sense and should be a part of the curriculum somewhere... I just think it should be taught separately from the coding/programming to ensure maximum fun/engagement.

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