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Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

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Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#31

Post by jdietrich »

camjw1123 wrote: post #26
pjc50 wrote: post #4

The computer literacy project was basically the last UK government attempt at doing industrial policy. It was a huge success, so they gave up on it and have abandoned industrial policy to market forces and financialisation. We have gone from that to "eff business". https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068....

I think this is a bit harsh, the current industrial strategy is pretty decent ( https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industr... ), whether they will deliver on this remains to be seen but it's not like they aren't thinking about industrial policy.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis.

Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk a good game, but it's all piecemeal and penny-ante. It's very difficult to actually find out the specifics of what the government is spending, but it's abundantly clear that we're being left in the dust by China.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#32

Post by mxcrossb »

The article seems very concerned about what is the right level of abstraction to teach. I understand the appeal of starting with Jacob’s loom, especially when you’re going to follow up with something low level like basic. But maybe code academy disagrees. Maybe young people these days don’t need convincing that computers just follow language commands, and with a high level language that’s maybe a safe lie to teach.

We might further wonder about what to teach for futures non von Neumann architectures. What is the Jacob’s loom if a multi core machine? The organ of a quantum computer?

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#33

Post by jdietrich »

Udo wrote: post #16

When a friend attempted to teach basic programming to his kids, I realized we're in trouble (for some definition of trouble, see below). First of all, the article is right in opining that the pathways to computer literacy in general, and programming in particular, are not really all that accessible anymore. The problem becomes even worse due to the sheer number of "teaching" tools available. My friend had trouble eve…

Strong recommendation for anyone pondering the same problem: the BBC Micro:bit. It's the v2 of the Raspberry Pi, with all the lessons learned from the unexpected success amongst adults and the unexpected failure amongst children and young people.

The Micro:bit is a simple and cheap embedded ARM board with a selection of sensors, an LED matrix, Bluetooth LE and alligator clip compatible IO. There is a progressive syllabus of programming, from drag-and-drop code blocks to MicroPython and Swift. The board can be programmed directly from the browser over USB, or directly from a mobile app over Bluetooth.

Most importantly, it's tremendous fun. It's basically a Defcon badge with child-friendly programming tools. Just like a Defcon badge, it instantly inspires curiosity and creativity.

https://microbit.org/guide/

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#34

Post by camjw1123 »

jdietrich wrote: post #31
camjw1123 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bit harsh, the current industrial strategy is pretty decent ( https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industr... ), whether they will deliver on this remains to be seen but it's not like they aren't thinking about industrial policy.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

  Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through
Yeah, I definitely agree with this. Nothing to add really, hopefully when there is more political bandwidth for this sort of stuff things will change.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#35

Post by mywacaday »

spzb wrote: post #2

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids but my school had just one computer (a BBC Micro, of course) which was wheeled on a trolley from one classroom to the next. We'd all take turns, usually in groups of three or four, to run whatever educational game was related to the work we were doing (usually…

We had one in a small Irish school, all I remember are logotron,some word editing and Mr. Ee. We used to leave one of the windows off the latch and go back into the school after hours to play Mr Ee, good times :-)

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#36

Post by growlist »

pjc50 wrote: post #4

The computer literacy project was basically the last UK government attempt at doing industrial policy. It was a huge success, so they gave up on it and have abandoned industrial policy to market forces and financialisation. We have gone from that to "eff business". https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068....

> It was a huge success, so they gave up on it

This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case that circumstances conspired against the UK? Is there something in the culture that led the UK to give up too easily in favour of easy money elsewhere? Was the UK deliberately undermined by e.g. the US (Black Arrow, TSR2)?

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#37

Post by rollthehard6 »

spzb wrote: post #2

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids but my school had just one computer (a BBC Micro, of course) which was wheeled on a trolley from one classroom to the next. We'd all take turns, usually in groups of three or four, to run whatever educational game was related to the work we were doing (usually…

Slightly older but there were BBCs at my school and a pal had one, but I was never allowed to use them at school as this was a privilege reserved for those that were better at maths than I :) Probably also the reason I ended up studying Chemistry at Uni and getting a hodge podge of credits Science BSc at the end of it. Exposure there to a VAX/VMS cluster ultimately took me on my journey from analyst/programmer to sysadmin/DBA/SAN/backup and now cloud IaC Devops engineer.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#38

Post by jlarcombe »

CmdrKrool wrote: post #27

I had a Spectrum at the time but looking back, I'm impressed by the thoroughness of the manual that came with the BBC Micro. From connecting the leads to BASIC to ROM system calls to assembly language, in one book. http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf

Yes, though actually the ZX Spectrum was also pretty good.. the famous Chapter 24 about the memory map was my first introduction to such matters and left a deep impression at a young age.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#39

Post by jacquesm »

Lio wrote: post #11
telesilla wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Acorn was my first programming computer at school - I didn't know it was from BBC Micro lineage! We were pretty lucky to have about 20 of them. I did NOT make enough use of this resource as a teenager, to my adult self's chagrin. This was largely because as a teenage girl, the last thing that was gonna happen was spending my lunch hours in the computer room where boys were playing adventure games. Lame. (Future m…

Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model. So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.

This one started it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1

And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom

The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#40

Post by ben7799 »

spzb wrote: post #2

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids but my school had just one computer (a BBC Micro, of course) which was wheeled on a trolley from one classroom to the next. We'd all take turns, usually in groups of three or four, to run whatever educational game was related to the work we were doing (usually…

It wasn't a BBC Micro but this is actually pretty similar to what we had in the US in the 1980s... I'm 41, mid 1980s we had one Apple IIe that got wheeled around on a trolley.

There were a handful of us who had parents who worked in the computer/tech/software industry, it was hilarious cause some of us were already ahead of the teachers by 10 or 11. I had taken my first BASIC class in 4th grade at a local college.

The teachers were reading from a script teaching us about how to switch between insert and delete mode on the keyboard and giving us assignments that amounted to writing out a sentence and then editing it in a word processor and there were a handful of us kids ready to do BASIC, etc..

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