Learning “computer code” will be offered in French primary schools

The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher.

For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers.

Personal opinion :

While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).

Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this day.

I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting thing was that it allowed experimenting.

Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the interpretation, ie BUGS!!!

What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.

And then... Nothing.

We learned how to solder stuff on circuit boards (yes, soldering irons, yes some kids burned themselves, big whoop), how to use glue guns (again, I burned myself a bit, nothing serious) to put components together when assembling basic machines.

Can you even imagine the kind of amazing physical computing kids could be doing with Arduino and Raspberry Pi these days. HTML & CSS seem like a no brainer. I learned those in a "Technology" (in regular class hours) during my last year of middle school (again, in Paris).

If it weren't for a sympathetic instructor who told us to do make a website using FrontPage on anything we were passionate about (RTS for me at the time) I'm not sure I'd be a web developer today. I think these kinds of a programs are a great first steps to get kids excited about the web and/or basic languages before middle school and high school classes (in our out of class schedule) provide more thorough or complex introductions to programming proper.

1. http://koodi2016.fi/ 2. http://csunplugged.org/

I got taught BASIC (BBC BASIC) and some ARM assembler [1] in 1992 at school in maths.

[1] ARM assembler because our maths teacher was moonlighting selling RISCOS software and was quite helpful.

The posted article also points out that the classes will be "périscolaire", i.e. outside of regular class hours. This means that the teachers who teach those courses will have to stay late. Only the super-committed teachers will volunteer to do that - and it's not a given that there will be such a teacher in every school. And even when there is, remember that the French school day typically finishes at 4.30p. The teacher will have to attempt teaching a group of exhausted pre-teens who just want to go home.

Additionally, again as mentioned in the article, almost a third of schools (16 000 out of 54 000) in France don't have access to high speed internet - and many, many students from the lower social groups may not have internet/computers at home. The government says that in September, half of these 16k schools will magically get high speed internet access through radio links. If history teaches us anything, those 9k schools certainly won't all get working internet overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if most schools still won't really have a functional internet by September 2015. And internet is not everything either- those schools (mostly rural and/or underfunded districts) are also very likely to have just a few, outdated computers for the whole school, without a budget to address that.

As someone with a graduate degree in computer science, extensive experience teaching CS/programming to kids/teenagers/adults, and an avid follower of work done by Piaget, Papert, Abelson, etc., I'm absolutely all for exposing children to computational ideas early, and using them to support and enhance learning. I've taught many such classes with kids 6-12 myself, and it can be done very successfully- even with kids who are not that interested in the first place.

Unfortunately here, it seems like it's a reactionary measure taken by our government to not be behind similar initiatives in the US and other countries, without much thought given into it. The fact that it is called "apprentissage du code informatique" rather than "apprentissage de la programmation" (or even "apprentissage de l'informatique") is not ideal either; the first thing that I associate it to is "apprentissage du code de la route" (classes that teach the laws behind driving, which you have to take before your driver's license in France), an association that I am sure many non-tech savvy parents or teachers will make in some way. With the taste French government has for putting certifications and "brevets" on everything, this is going to get silly quite fast (I remember the B2i I had to take in middle school, a "certificate" for internet & computers that we obtained after being taught what was essentially an internet explorer class by a shop teacher who was way out of his depth).

Interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ministre de l'Éducation is merging effective, proven 2-year university diplomas that produce high quality computer technicians (who can then easily take on a computer engineering/computer science degree) with tangentially related electronic engineering ones, just to save money: http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-....

Things like the latter will definitely hurt France's ability to compete on the international tech scene. On the other hand, I'm not sure teaching HTML after class hours in schools were teachers are already overworked and lacking critical resources will do much.

Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year), we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead.

Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing during these classes).

Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with programming at all.

At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms, while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot.

The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split in two parts:

* basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle")

* applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle

Nothing much learned in these classes, if anything actually.

I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I only have shitty memories about these times.

Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear, especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids anything.

In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have. You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system.

The official word used is "coding", not "programming", which leaves a slightly bad aftertaste.

Anyway, there is already an option for the scientific students in the last year of high school, the so called "Computer and digital science" (https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-inform...).