Learning “computer code” will be offered in French primary schools

The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher.

For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers.

Personal opinion :

While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).

Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody.

That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a few hands and a total distrust of institutions.

Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year), we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead.

Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing during these classes).

Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with programming at all.

At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms, while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot.

The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split in two parts:

* basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle")

* applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle

Nothing much learned in these classes, if anything actually.

I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I only have shitty memories about these times.

Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear, especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids anything.

In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have. You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system.

Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this day.

I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting thing was that it allowed experimenting.

Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the interpretation, ie BUGS!!!

What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.