“The success of the BBC Micro in the 1980s shows what’s possible. There’s no reason why Raspberry Pi shouldn’t have the same impact, with the right support,” he said. ”It’s vital to expose kids to this early if they’re to have the chance of a career in computing. Only 2% of Google engineers say they weren’t exposed to computer science at high school. While not every child is going to become a programmer, those with aptitude shouldn’t be denied the chance.”
Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, visited London’s Science Museum to give a talk on Why Science Matters, the company will be sponsoring the charity Teach First to take on more than a hundred “exceptional” graduates for training and subsequent mentoring. These new teachers will also be given bursaries by Google with which to buy classroom equipment. Schmidt used his speech to mention Raspberry Pi as relevant, cost-appropriate classroom hardware for the scheme.
The news is from :
Google, Teach First, and Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi blog)
Google funds computer teachers and Raspberry Pis in England (BBC News)
Along with our previous post: Why Play Games When You Can Build Ones, we can see computer science or computational thinking are now becoming one important part of UK education through:
1) The ICT curriculum of computer science in UK is in the process of changing what children learn about computers following a successful campaign that showed how important basic programming skills would be in the future.
2) Nationwide after-school clubs, like Code Club project, wants to make programming cool and fun and inspire kids to learn coding (they will create online teaching resources for 12 weeks lesson plan based on Scratch, the most famous tool to teach kids coding from MIT)
So, let’s zoom this out a little, it’s a good time to re-visit this TED talk from Conrad Wolfram. We always think math education is to strengthen logical reasoning ability, but computers have changed every aspect of our life except formal math curriculum. If the goal of education is to grow problem-solving capability in real world, then learning to utilize digital power by playing with computers or coding should be included in classrooms. It might become one key literacy that create digital gap between individuals or countries.
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