Should Students in Primary Schools Learn Computer Science?

Primary Schools Teach Computer Science  UK  Primary Schools (K-12)  Computing at School Working Group (CAS), Google and Microsoft

Why A Change? Especially in the UK  Change in the overall school system  ICT and Computing  Networking and IT work (vocational)  Simon Peyton-Jones  Michael Gove’s speech  Almost every field depends on technology  Bill Gates warned for the need of children to understand computer programming

Michael Gove  “It's clear that technology is going to bring profound changes to how and what we teach. But it's equally clear that we have not yet managed to make the most of it.”

Why Should Common People Know Computing  Technology is present almost everywhere you go  Most job’s use technology in some way  Use of an employee to do a simple program instead of hiring a temp outside the company.  Someone will need help at sometime.  “Twenty years ago, medicine was not an information technology. Now, genomes have been decoded and the technologies of biological engineering and synthetic biology are transforming medicine. The boundary between biology and IT is already blurring into whole new fields, like bio-informatics.” - Gove

STEM Discipline  Long Term Value  A Body of Knowledge  A Set of Techniques & Methods  A way of Thinking & Working  Own Theoretical Foundations  Involves logic & reasoning  Scientific approach  Wide Range of Technologies  Provides insight into other STEM Disciplines

What Should they Teach?  Microsoft Office  Real CS  Data Representation  Communication  Abstraction & Design  Languages, machines, & Computation

What Would be the Standards  A-Level computing  year olds  Ending Goals (by Key Stages)  Algorithms: what it is, what it can be used for.  Programs: design, write, run and debug executable programs in at least one language  How computers represent and transport data.  Components that make up a computer system

Which Languages?  Scratch or Mindstorm Like  Java, Python, C++  A mathematics language  How do we choose a language to start kids out on?

Is it Possible?  Teachers  Why would they want to teach  What would be a standard curriculum  Raspberry Pi  Would the material be valid?  Compared to taking a foreign language  It helps  Should not be mandatory.

Pros and Cons  Help Teach Math & Logic  Inspire more students to take CS to a degree level.  CS represents fundamental knowledge of the world like math or physics or geography  What Languages  Lack of CS Teachers  Too Vocational