Name of UK Tech Initiative?

[Ben Rubinstein]

On 14/02/2013 05:19, Judy Perry wrote:
> I seem to recall that in the last year or so, there was a UK STEM initiative
> to introduce programming in the schools but I've lost the link and was
> wondering if any of you possibly had it?

I'm afraid that "initiative" is a bit optimistic - after years in which "ICT" 
in our schools has meant teaching kids to use PowerPoint and Excel, our 
Education Minister (= Secretary of State for E in your terms) suddenly 
announced that he (like a lot of people who've been mouthing off about this 
for a while) thought it should actually teach control of the machines.

Unfortunately as far as I know this hasn't progressed beyond a photo-op with 
Eric Schmidt, who's just bought a bunch of Raspberry Pis for schools [1] 
(because Google would like to have a larger supply of programmers trained for 
them, although they evade paying their share of the taxes to pay for this [2].)

This was really the origin of the Pi - the idea was that it would help 
introduce programming in schools - but I've always thought this was nonsense, 
as the problem with programming in schools isn't that they don't have 
computers, but that the ICT teachers don't know how to program themselves - 
they have computers, that's what they teach PowerPoint on...  When my daughter 
started at secondary school I spoke to the ICT teacher at each of the schools 
we visited - they all said that they'd love to teach programming - but 
actually none of them did.  See also [3].

The other thing we have going on is Code Club, which Peter linked you to - 
this is totally volunteer (one of my colleagues is running one at his kid's 
school, and we've hosted sessions at our office), and is based on Scratch. 
It's a very good well-worked out scheme, but while I think Scratch is an 
excellent system for the very beginning stages of learning, it obviously 
limits how far kids can go with it - which is where I think LC represents a 
great advantage.


[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18182280

[2] 
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/google-boss-im-very-proud-of-our-tax-avoidance-scheme-8411974.html

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18187205