New SA coding curriculum risks "disastrous failure"

[S.Claus]

I only see them funneling money out to some external tender company who builds basic PCs that cost R500k each .

 

[Swa]

Coding? It's bloody programming. Coding is what the Germans did in WW2.

 

[ekske1]

Make sense. Was like that in 2006 when I selected I.T. as my subject. Only 30 people were allowed as well. 2008 we ended Matric with 15 of us left. You also had to be excellent at maths to get into the class.

But making it compulsory is K@K. Not everyone can handle it.

Pascal ftw

 

[My_King]

Pascal ftw

We did Turbo Delphi. We used to give our teacher crap that the license(2008) will expire soon...was 2018 or something.

Wasn`t Delphi based on Pascal?

 

[ToxicBunny]

We did Turbo Delphi. We used to give our teacher crap that the license(2008) will expire soon...was 2018 or something.

Wasn`t Delphi based on Pascal?

Delphi was pretty much object Oriented pascal... In a very simple sense

 

[Bewlen]

Welcome to South Africa, where our lee-dahs brainfart their way through parliament, and the points don't matter.
Remind me again how many of our 'pupils' take science & math? But you want to make coding compulsory? Lol. K then.

 

[garyc]

One problem is that most of our teachers are not familiar with the relevant programming languages. The fourth industrial revolution is by definition and engineering related discipline, where the most relevant languages for engineering are:

• Python (including for APIs and lots of bindings for engineering functions)
• LabVIEW (for system control and data acquisition)
• MATLAB and similar such as GNU Octave (always needed)
• Java (can be useful for analyzing large data sets and also robotics)
• C++ (for high performance computing)
• Fortran (also for high performance computing)
• Simulink (system design and simulation)

Someone can no doubt think of a couple more. The point is that these languages do not correspond with the typical skill base of teachers.

 

[ponder]

This is going to fail spectaculary. I'm no programmer & I dont think the language is nearly as important as the underlying principals of programming.

School teachers are not going to deliver this experience as they are not competant in the majority of cases.

 

[Bhabs]

public class YoungCoders
{
Public static void main (String [] args)
{
System.out.println ("80% of high school kids can't even use a simple word processing application")
System.out.println ("How's that for coding the young ones")
}
}

 

[zizo911]

Wow... Our school has been trailed to introduce this subject next year... Can only imagine what mess it is going to be

 

[moosag]

Intentions are great and it is a must especially if our youth are going to have a chance at jobs and competing with the rest of the international community.

Unfortunately it will fail. They can barely teach university students to code. Teaching primary and high school kids to code with the current state of resources (i.e. Teachers) it just is not going to happen. You cant force these type of things to happen overnight. Our biggest problem in SA is that the education fraternity is filled with people who just need jobs. Those days of passionate teachers are gone. I am sure they still exist but in pockets.

Teaching coding kids requires passionate teachers who can go over and above what is required in order to achieve this result. I just dont see this happening in the next 2-5 years.