Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown University already accomplished this and gave a great talk about the problems of creating a new course, when you can just shove it into the existing math classes without needing to hire thousands of specialist teachers or worry about yet another mandatory class where schools reduce the rigor, or worry about students not even being able to take the class because they are in remedial classes and never even make it to a computational elective <a href="https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs</a>
I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and we are very involved with the NCCE which SPJ talked about.<p>If any of your are even slightly inspired by what was talked about in this video, and would like to get involved with teaching the next generation of hackers, then I'd like to suggest that you think about starting or supporting one of the clubs SPJ mentioned.<p>CodeClubs are school based clubs that you can run in a local school. We provide all the resources and guidance you need, and you can get involved here.<p><a href="https://codeclub.org/en/" rel="nofollow">https://codeclub.org/en/</a><p>Coder Dojos are clubs that are run at weekends, in libraries, offices and community centers. Again, we provide educational resources to help you out.<p><a href="https://coderdojo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://coderdojo.com/</a><p>Both of these clubs are international. So it doesn't matter which country you are based in.<p>Also happy to answer any questions people have.<p>Oh, and if you have kids and want to get them started, checkout some of our projects. These are the Scratch ones.<p><a href="https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects?software%5B%5D=scratch" rel="nofollow">https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects?software%5B%5D=...</a>
I really enjoy listening to SPJ on almost any topic. He seems so friendly as well as knowledgeable. And humble! I already like Haskell, but I bet he could convince me to like almost anything else.
I work in a similar organisation to SPJ in Australia, the Australian Computing Academy (<a href="https://aca.edu.au" rel="nofollow">https://aca.edu.au</a>). Everything he said mirrors quite closely what has been happening in Australia for the past decade. We also have a national curriculum (<a href="https://docs.acara.edu.au/resources/Digital_Technologies_-_Sequence_of_content.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://docs.acara.edu.au/resources/Digital_Technologies_-_S...</a>) which we're rolling out across the country.<p>The main take away I've received from doing this job for the past two years is the same one that SPJ reiterates in his talk. Teaching is a very distributed discipline. There's no top down solution to implementing a new curriculum. If you work in the industry and volunteer to help a school you can make a huge difference!
I unknowingly met him once in 2002 or 2003, and I’ve just this second realised who he was.<p>I was visiting Microsoft Research in Cambridge writing an article for PC Format magazine, a British computer mag. They took me to see a few people to show off Microsoft Research.<p>There was this one guy who talked to me in his office. He got very excited about Haskell (which I didn’t know what it was) and he was also working on some Excel feature he was convinced of the brilliance of, but hasn’t persuaded the product team of.<p>His theory was that the only thing you know about an Excel spreadsheet is that most of your predications are wrong. My interpretation was that he was proposing a way of indicating a probabilistic range rather than a hard number.<p>I don’t know if this ever made it into Excel, or if indeed this was what he was talking about.<p>But it’s amazing to see this odd fellow I met was actually quite famous.
Just my 2c but this is one of the worst ideas.<p>First, this was designed by politicians who I am sure everyone on this sub would hate (basically, the Brexit boys). The stated aim was to be more elitist: make subjects much harder, encourage smart children...and dumb children...well...sorry, if you are dumb when we test you at 11 then you will be digging ditches.<p>Second, the logic for this came from people who had never taught in schools. Again, the people above declared war on teachers. And then took advice on how to educate children from people who had only worked in tertiary education (I actually support a lot of the principles but the implementation has been beyond dire, and loaded with corruption).<p>Third, try explaining programming without computers to a child. There are so many abstract concepts...it is just insane. I understand why an academic thinks this is a good idea. More jobs for the boys. But it still makes no sense.<p>Fourth, this feeds into the aspect of British culture that reveres irrelevant knowledge (and despises practice). Nowhere is this more evident that in CS departments. Example: the UK has great CS depts but no innovation within business. The university local to me has a top ML department, they have been doing speech recognition since the 60s...all the PHds leave, there is only one speech recognition startup in the city...and that is govt-funded afaik. Taking advice from people like the OP is suicidal.