IT education in schools and universities

    In continuation of the introductory article about my view on education and in anticipation of the story about my own project (and the business incubator that helped, and much more) I want to write a little about IT training.

    Mandatory and optional subjects, standards


    Firstly, the number of compulsory subjects is rather small.

    Secondly, programs for additional subjects are not a standard, but simply a recommendation.

    Thirdly, textbooks for these additional subjects are also “recommended”. You can use any. For example, good schools often use university textbooks.

    Computer science is a compulsory school subject. The standard says that the purpose of the discipline is "to acquire initial understanding of computer literacy."


    What is now


    Everyone had computer science in the school, apparently. What exactly was given there - it could all be completely different.

    Firstly, there were transfers from one number system to another, counting the amount of information and other points related to mathematics. Utility is akin to the usefulness of mathematics: fundamentally, develops, etc.

    Secondly, there was programming (someone on what, I have pascal).

    Thirdly, there was Word and the company.

    What is offered


    Naturally, I did not come up with anything new, and such suggestions sound. If those who nominated them would take and write a curriculum in accordance with these ideas, it would be used somewhere.

    The bottom line is that you do not need to teach programming in a clean and incomprehensible way. Those who need to learn themselves. Whoever doesn’t need, and most of them do not, can’t take anything out of the course, and they write the programs to them at the desk and at school and at the university.

    What I think should be taught. Applied use of programming. Mostly scripted, of course. It doesn’t matter what OS it is. But it’s clear that most people don’t use Windows Script Host tokens, and they are afraid of Linux due to the fact that they can’t go far without a console and bash (I tried it!).

    Scripts help make daily use of your computer easier and more convenient. I will give an example. My often draws up, no matter where and why :), "articles" with lists of all kinds of metal albums and other heavy music. He gives them marks according to rateyourmusic. He asked me to make him a script that would display "stars" for evaluation.

    assessment

    Then he decided that it’s more convenient not to change the links, but to immediately insert ready pictures. Here is the code that creates the whole set from one star at once.

    9) & ($j<100)) $t = "0".$t;
    	imagepng($im2, "star$t.png");
    	imagedestroy($im2);
    }
    ?>

    Another example is the password generator that I use. Implemented as a CI console controller, but this does not affect the main code in any way.

     7) | (strlen($second) < 5) );
    	$third = rand(10, 99);
    	echo $first.strtolower(trim($second)).$third."\n";
    }
    ?>

    I want schools to teach such simple but useful things. It is not necessary to hammer knowledge into the heads, but to show their usefulness in order to stimulate self-education. In fact, the school’s task is to instill interest in important areas of knowledge, as well as to establish the most interesting areas for the child with which he wants to connect his life (enter a university), career guidance.

    Also popular now: