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Callum breaks things

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.

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Callum breaks things

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  1. Callum breaks things

  2. 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.

  3. This is Callum (at BlackBerry Jam)

  4. Callum is 17 • He is a co-founder of C2Developmentwww.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...

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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...

  9. 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(“-”);

  10. 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.printlnto 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!

  11. 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.

  12. 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

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. Any questions? • Website: www.kateglover.co.uk • Twitter: @lifson

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