At Miromedia, we know our stuff when it comes to coding and computational skills. But this news will have even the most advanced technology bods sweating under the collar…
The landscape of schooling has been set to change, with the introduction of tougher curriculum currently being planned andimplemented by governing school boards in the UK. The new national curriculum planned to be introduced teaches computer coding to children as young as 5 years old. Critics are commenting that the introduction of technology jargon and skill set is somewhat unnecessary at this age and that other subjects should take precedent, however, the school boards argue that this is simply a natural progression which mirrors the technological progression of the world. This schooling will give British pupils a head start, providing helping to take them to new levels later in life.
The new agenda for children in schools will include teaching them how to write computer code. Five to seven year olds will be expected to “understand what algorithms are” and to “create and debug simple programs”. Additionally by the age of 11, UK students will be required to “design, use and evaluate computational abstractions that model the state and behaviour of real-world problems and physical systems”. This sounds particularly complex for an 11 year old child to have a comprehensive knowledge of, however it could be said that it is less complicated than learning long division.
This idea has been embraced by different learning enablers, a prime example is the BBC. They have started developing children’s programs and pieces of educational and informational material that will help children to learn the basics of computing and how computers work.
BBC Bitesize, and Cbeebies have started developing content that could be accessible and aesthetically pleasing to their younger audiences, through interactive online learning and informational videos. ‘Nina and the Neutrons: Go Digital’ is one show that has taken up this challenge. Learning these skills will be achieved through techniques like personifying computing intricacies like megabytes and terabytes as characters in adventure stories. CBeebies are in talks of releasing a television show which follows a younger child exploring the aspects of computing through different adventures, e.g. a journey to find out how the internet works.
This will allow the student audience to be able to relate to the information, and subsequently absorb the knowledge that they are being presented with. Furthermore, this has been advocated by celebrities of the children’s TV circuit Dick and Dom on the CBeebies channel. Their show “Appsolute Genius” explores the people who are behind the different technological inventions throughout the ages. This, presenting valuable historical knowledge in a child friendly, accessible format.
It remains to be seen what kind of impact that this new implementation of curriculum will have on the young generation in the future, but we can only assume as the world is becoming evermore technology savvy, that it will give them valuable knowledge and experience to assist them later on in life.
This article was written by Drew Rapley, a Content Marketing Executive at Miromedia.
*source – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-28987787 *source – http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2014/computing-coding
