Copy of blogpost I was asked to contribute about my thioughts on the relevance of the new POS for computiung as part of a Barefoot / BT project
I still remember the 1st time I held a computer in my hands and touched a keyboard (well kind of it was a membrane ZX81) one Friday night at Boys Brigade. I now I have romanced the idea and at the time it was another way of playing a game on a TV screen like the Atari clone we had a home that could only play Pong / Tennis and a shooting game involving firing a gun a black moving square on the screen.
One year later Xmas 82 I got my 1st computer for Christmas a ZX Spectrum 48K with colour / sound etc. How I marvelled at the complex programs from Manic Miner to Lunar Jetman and slavishly type in BASIC code from 'Input Magazine' to make a rudimentary text adventure game (PRINT / RAND / POKE etc)
Fast forward 32 years and how things have changed in so many ways, computers and devices are more powerful by the day and can achieve things that would have been considered impossible 10 years ago never mind 20 or 30 . However I still believe that although are more adept at using them in comparison to me a the same age in some ways their understanding of the mechanics and computational thinking that I wondered at in my day is not the same. Again I fully realised that although I understood the concept of the code to run the programs I would not have known the wonder of binary arithmetic or logic gates that students know are considering at the highest levels of KS3.
The analogy of a car is still the most descriptive that I know - from tinkering under the bonnet to try and fix a broken alternator or fuel pump with my 1st Mini that only lasted 3 months until the engine broke and the wing fell off. To the average car of today that needs a computer plugging in to tell the mechanic what is wrong. Likewise students have such technical interfaces in front of them that so few are driven to tinker and understand deeper.
All of this is a very roundabout way of addressing the need for a new curriculum and develop greater computational thinking / problem solving and coding skills. It is such a transferable knowledge base in all other aspects of their lives and education that I should be higher up in status than it presently is. However I still think the hardest part is bridging the gap between understanding the thirst for knowledge from all in the class especially with the issues that mixed ability grouping brings.
However hopefully we are moving forward and when I am retired and finished and my children's children using their quantum computing machines in 30 years time look back to the end of the binary age it will hopefully be just as relevant
