Callum breaks things

Kate Glover Just finished first year of BSc(Hons) Internet

Computing course at University of Brighton with view to continuing to PGCE to teach secondary school ICT!

Formerly spent 8 years as a Network Technician at a large FE college.

Spent 2 of those years also teaching adult ed. (Web Construction) and Functional Skills ICT.

This is Callum (at BlackBerry Jam)

Callum is 17 He is a co-founder of C2Development

www.c2dev.org

He is both competent and confident coding in HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, C, C++, C# and more.

Callum has grown up in a “technologically positive” household.

Callum breaks things...

Breaks things?

Callum has been encouraged to “play” with computers by his step-father, who is an IT Trainer for a large private company.

If he broke things – he was not chastised, but encouraged to learn how to fix them.

His computer at home wasn’t “locked down” – just re-imaged if he had nuked it beyond reasonable repair.

How has this made me Rethink ICT? Stop locking down workstations so that students

can’t do anything with them.

With Windows Deployment Services etc. a classroom can be re-imaged quickly and easily, in the time it takes to do your summary, switch classes, and run your re-cap – or during break/lunch.

This would permit students to be more adventurous, and learn that computers do not have to be handled with white gloves.

Why I think this should work Callum is now employed as a software

developer for a company in America – teleworking from my living room and taking home more money than I did when I was working five jobs!

Callum appreciates the value of backing up his work, server/workstation environments, and that computers can be tools for facilitating innovation and creativity – rather than just for writing letters and playing games.

Nick

Nick is representative of most of my fellow students at Uni.

He is a hard-worker, and as a result, generally quite a high achiever.

Nick drops loads of marks in his programming exams, because he can’t problem-solve for toffee...

A recent exam question *---- We had to find 5 faults in a

**--- pre-written program which***--generated this pattern, of a ****- height/width determined by a***** user-defined number.

One of the faults could be spotted by comparing these two lines of code:

System.out.println(“*”); System.out.print(“-”);

The answer Running the program and examining the output

showed that there was no more than one * per line, whereas the –s appeared grouped horizontally on the lines as the brief required.

I revised my code so that both lines read System.out.print rather than System.out.println to see what happened – knowing that I could put it back if it didn’t work.

It did work – marks won, on to the next question!

The problem

None of the fellow students I had spoken to after the exam had fixed that fault.

They were outraged when I told them what I had done to fix it. “We’d never seen print instead of println before! How could we have known?”

They had missed the point.

The problem

Having helped out quite a bit – I knew that their problem-solving abilities were somewhat lacking.

The same was true across their academic experience. Most of them saw a problem, and considered it an “end point” rather than a mere hurdle which could be overcome with logic

How this has made me Rethink ICT We need to introduce logical approaches to

breaking down and solving large/complex problems at a much earlier age.

Run, check, analyse, fix, run, check, analyse, fix...

Introducing programming in schools should certainly help with this.

Primary schools may need to play a larger part in this too. Perhaps introduce “machines” which need to be fixed one step at a time.

Why I think this should work Myself and Alex (a fellow student)

DO already do these things.

We have both come from non-technological families, but with a background of playing with Meccano / LEGO Technic and writing our own computer programs (albeit in BASIC!) from primary school age.

Any questions?

Website: www.kateglover.co.uk

Twitter: @lifson