Computer Science is back!


Yes! I heard! :D


There's an interesting thread on it on the Raspberry Pi forum here, too. The third post in the thread, by Liz (she's part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation), is well worth reading.
 
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lol I was just about to head over there to see if anything had been posted about it... It's definately good news for Raspberry pi :)
 
Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but actually what's more worrying is whether there are enough teachers qualified to teach computer science. The beeb report said only 750 teachers in the UK have Computer Science degrees!


Much like when I was at school in the 80's, we had a room full of Link 480z machines but no-one qualified to teach them, hence the room was locked and only ever used by lucky-git sixth formers!
 
Hey, pretty cool! Maybe this'll set a precedent in America. We've got some very good CS departments in a lot of major universities, but not so much in public schools.
 
Now, please, fix the rest of the world too :)


(man, when I was in like Grade 2 or 3, they had a Commodore PET and it was awesome. Net get off my lawn :(


jeff
 
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nice, just learned I am actually doing science... seems way cooler than just coding... :D
 
I wish we had it here in Aus, our programming class in the year 11 standard is Visual Basic.
 
in my junior school we had bbc micros :) and the screens were green and dark green lol the printers used big rolls of paper with holes down the side that were used to pull the paper through the printer :p the text was not nice though it was blocky like it was on the screen :p
 
^ And if they were the same printers that my school had, then they made this banshee-like screaming noise whilst they were printing. :p


We did get to pinch tons of paper for drawing on if it was raining outside, at least! :lol:
 
In middle school I wrote and helped the teacher (the history teacher) prepare the tiny bit of programming we did. She made me stay behind one day and show her 'how to program'. Then she just copied out our little bit of code and showed the class how to do it a few days later.


On a BBC micro. In the 90s.


I was using an Amiga at home and the BBC just seemed like a ridiculous pile of shit, but I actually appreciate how ahead of its time it was when released in 1981 now.


I think I was in one of the last years to do any 'real' computer science, it was replaced with learning to use MS office as all the BBCs were junked.


We did used to enjoy those crappy learning adventure games on the BBC though, especially pressing 'break' and replacing the text with whatever rude school boy sillyness we could think of, then leaving it running for the next class.
 
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In middle school I wrote and helped the teacher (the history teacher) prepare the tiny bit of programming we did. She made me stay behind one day and show her 'how to program'. Then she just copied out our little bit of code and showed the class how to do it a few days later.


On a BBC micro. In the 90s.
Lucky. I caught the tail-end of the BBC's computer literacy scheme, but missed out on programming at school, alas. :( (I did my best to get my head around it at home, but I don't seem to have the mindset for it. I might try again once the educational materials for the Raspberry Pi are released.)

We did used to enjoy those crappy learning adventure games on the BBC though, especially pressing 'break' and replacing the text with whatever rude school boy sillyness we could think of, then leaving it running for the next class.
We used to feed those things colloquialisms and laugh like morons when it wasn't understood. ("There is a monster. What should I do?", "Peg it.", "Does not understand peg it.". And so on.) It was pretty stupid, really. :p


What got me with mine, was that when the BBC Model Bs were deprecated in favour of some generic beige box provided by the Tesco Computers For Schools scheme (which coincided with no longer being allowed to use the computers at all, remarkably :rolleyes: ), the very anti-games staff went and got a copy of Lemmings behind our backs. Cheeky hypocrites!


We only found it because they left the thing unattended once - before granting permission for us to play it after we found them out. :lol:
 
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Things I remember about the BBC micro:


logging into the network with "* I AM "........


making a string of "Teletext" pages for some exercise


and the head of computing taking control of people's machines, and giving them a telling off on screen whilst IN ANOTHER ROOM!!!! (it seemed pretty amazing at the time)


I remember being pretty unimpressed with the PCs we were allowed to use just before I left school and thinking my Amiga was better.
 
We had the older darker coloured Commodre 64's in our class.The teacher was crap and so we did'nt learn much.Just played frogger and other grossly out of date games.There was a couple of old clunky printers too. I had an amiga 500 at home so the classroom setup seemed out of date by a country mile.
 
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We had the wonderful RM Nimbus machines at my school.


Our IT lessons consisted of trying to create documents, a little bit of basic database creation etc.


That was at the start of the 90's, unfortunately my school was crap at most things.
 
We had the wonderful RM Nimbus machines at my school

That sounds familiar.... I think those were the "awesome" PCs that we were so lucky to get before I left lol


Edit: Of course they were for the use of the senior years only, everyone else was still using the Beebs :)
 
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We had the wonderful RM Nimbus machines at my school

That sounds familiar.... I think those were the "awesome" PCs that we were so lucky to get before I left lol


Edit: Of course they were for the use of the senior years only, everyone else was still using the Beebs :)
I got to touch the one RM Nimbus machine that my school had *all of once*. No, just touch it. Because they didn't trust nine-year-old chibi-Prometheus to use a computer competently (ooh, that grated), they assigned me to be "supervised" by some year 6 girl who spent most of her time sucking her thumb and getting her wet digits all over the machine (which made me cringe). She hogged the thing and I never even got to use it. What a waste of time! :rolleyes:
 
The only other computers I remember having were in the CDT department, which were the Archimedes.
 
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