I read Bill Brown's letter with a mixture of disappointment and dismay (August 4).
He poses the question in Latin: "cui bono" – who stands to gain? May I, as a computing teacher, offer a hopefully constructive response?
The obvious beneficiaries are our young people. Mr Brown's declaration that commercial forces are at work offers an unbalanced perspective on the subject. He asserts the preferable setting for teaching computing science is in further and higher education. Computing, including programming, has been taught in Scottish schools since the mid-1980s, at Standard Grade, Higher and Advanced Higher level and latterly at Intermediate 2. Now with the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), computing science concepts are being introduced at an earlier stage, including primary schools. Universities are engaging with schools to encourage and promote an understanding of computing science ideas, particularly at early secondary level. From my own experience, the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow has created curriculum-related workshops and brought enthusiastic university students into the classroom through the University Student Ambassadors scheme.
There are other examples of academic involvement. MIT in Boston developed the Scratch visual programming language to help children learn mathematical and computational ideas. This year the Royal Society produced a report Shut down or restart: the way forward for computing in UK schools. Following this, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (which surely does not have the commercial interests of the games industry at heart), with the BCS Academy of Computing, initiated a project resulting in imaginative school learning resources which explore mobile devices and new interfaces.
As your article notes, an important step forward in CfE has been to distinguish ICT as an aid to learning from the discipline of computing science, an area where the English curriculum is now catching up ("Expert calls for revamp of digital teaching in schools", August 3). For the past two years in my own school, S1 and S2 pupils have enjoyed learning basic programming concepts through the contexts of animation and games design. Benefits for pupils extend to developing problem-solving skills, logical thinking and, not least, creativity, whether or not they specialise in computing later.
I am in favour of a broad-based education and suggest that in the 21st century learning about computing, opposed to ICT, must be an essential element of it.
Ann McVey,
20 Rosslea Drive,
Giffnock.
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