I.T. lessons in PowerPoint to be scrapped

NathanE · 11 Jan 2012 at 10:12

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929

Finally!

To be replaced by a proper CompSci GCSE that will be heavily influenced by open source technologies.

This is awesome. I wish I was a kid again

Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.

I wonder if there will be a huge shortage of CompSci teachers... and where there is undersupply there is higher salaries!

NathanE · 11 Jan 2012 at 10:18

It's a scandal really that the I.T. curriculum was allowed to fester in this way for over a decade. If a lesson is considered "boring" then it isn't difficult enough.

NathanE · 11 Jan 2012 at 10:23

You can't just learn CompSci over night (or even over a summer break) and be qualified to teach it. So the majority of existing ICT teachers will have to be made redundant.

And new teachers recruited either straight out of uni. with a CompSci degree or from industry.

This is going to cause a rather huge skills shortage. But that's good

NathanE · 11 Jan 2012 at 20:39

GreatAuk said:
About time... IT GCSE was such a ridiculous piece of tosh... It did it in 2009, and remember having to learn the pros and cons of dot matrix printers and floppy discs lol. Then the questions... 'what does RAM stand for?' *list of retarded abbreviations*, which field has been incorrectly filled out in this form? *Age: Accountant* etc...

It was the most thoroughly boring syllabus and coursework (although I suppose the coursework made you use your knowledge of MS office to solve a specific problem and made you explain your decisions etc so wasn't just about using MS office) I have ever had the displeasure of being student to.

This new course sounds great, wish they'd done this years ago!

edit: bahaha after counting up the marks on questions I got right and finding it satisfactory, I remember spending the last 1/2 an hour of the exam filling up the last couple of pages of my exam with drawings of tanks, and writing a short letter to the examiner asking for an A*... They obliged.

edit2: This is the exam I took: http://www.edexcel.com/migrationdocuments/QP Current GCSE/June 2009/1185_2H_que_20090519.pdf
It actually seems to have more content and stuff that I had to remember than I remember it having, but still, what a rubbish GCSE.

Question 14 is not answerable. What an utterly stupid exam paper.

NathanE · 11 Jan 2012 at 20:51

Things like SpeedStep, self temperature monitoring, CPU load throttling and core hibernation are enough for me to rule out the "Monitoring system performance" option as being the one.

But storing data... CPUs do that, there's nothing else in the system that does that operation more than a CPU. They have to store data in registers, L1/L2/L3 cache and RAM all the freaking time!