The UK Department of Education has confirmed that ICT lessons in schools -- essentially teaching children how to use Microsoft Word and Powerpoint -- are to be disapplied from the national curriculum, allowing teachers freedom in what they teach.
ICT lessons have been heavily criticized in recent years, with Ian Livingstone, life president of Eidos, recently commenting, "ICT is not computing... we've wasted generations of people who can't code."
Earlier this year, Department for Education secretary Michael Gove said that the lessons would be altered to include "an open source curriculum" and "rigorous computer science courses."
It has now been officially decided that, from September 2012, computing teachers will be given "the freedom and flexibility to design an ICT curriculum that is best for their pupils."
"Overall, there was a broad consensus amongst respondents that the existing Programmes of Study and Attainment Targets for ICT were not fit for purpose," read a statement from the department.
Teachers are now free to teach a proposed open source approach that will allow schools to adopt pre-made or customized curriculums developed by leading academic experts and businesses.
I wonder if the Raspberry Pi ($25/$35) computer will be able to gain some momentum with this development. It was produced with the education of children in mind but I think it would just be a lot of fun for anyone to mess around with, like Arduino.
Not sure what ICT curriculum is, but if it's just Word and Powerpoint it sounds disappointingly like my highschool options years ago (had to learn programming on the side). It seems like the type of logical thinking one can gain from learning how to programming is useful outside of doing so professionally, so I think it should be taught as early as possible in at least a rudimentary form alongside basic Math, English, History, etc. Knowing what an if statement is should be as common as knowing what addition is.
