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posted by martyb on Saturday September 05 2015, @10:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the isn't-there-an-app-for-that? dept.

A number of schools have failed to train their teachers in the government's flagship computing curriculum introduced last year, which was intended to turn Blighty into a nation of coders.

One third of 27 secondary schools teaching kids up to and including GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) level have failed to spend any money training staff in the computing curriculum (on the new Key Stage 3 and 4), according to a number of Freedom of Information responses sent to software company MapR Technologies.

In contrast, the research revealed some schools had spent thousands training staff, indicating a huge disparity between institutions.

The article applies to the UK, but could as easily apply to the United States and elsewhere. How do we teach our kids to code if their teacher's can't code, and can't or won't learn first?


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @02:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @02:37PM (#232618)

    Yes, Gamemaker! With Gamemaker, you can do anything. There is nothing you cannot do with Gamemaker. Why are you cowering? Because you don't use Gamemaker for all your programming needs. Whereas other programming languages might be speedy, Gamemaker offers slowness like no other. Gamemaker teaches patience. Gamemaker is the greatest. Gamemaker will take you to the bleeding edge of programming.

    Return, return, return, return, return to Gamemakerdoooooooooooooooooom!

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by helel on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:05PM

    by helel (2949) on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:05PM (#232633)

    My first experience programing was playing around with the map editor for StarCraft. I suspect there are plenty of others who first learned the basics of programing in a similar manner. Certainly I've met children today who are learning the basics of logic gates from Minecraft. The idea isn't that the children will be using Gamemaker forever, it's that they'll be interested and engaged enough to pick up the basics of programing. In the future those basics will serve them well if they chose to learn a real programing language or even if they just need to do a little scripting to automate things on their own computer.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @05:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @05:10PM (#232666)

      All programming languages and software not made in Gamemaker are garbage. Gamemaker is the True Programming Language. Anyone who doesn't use Gamemaker for all of their programming needs is a False Programmer. True Programmers also only use software written in Gamemaker.