this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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It's odd to me that you're disagreeing with their actual experience teaching.
Lots of us have the experience of being the kid in that situation though. I learnt python in secondary school.
Which kid? The gifted one, the one who didn't understand loops and used 20 variables for 20 iterations, the one who didn't understand how to write pseudo code, the one who was dyslexic,.....?
Which Year? I didn't say it wasn't appropriate for high school, I said it wasn't appropriate for Year 7 as a first programming language.
Also, who do you mean by "us"? Programmers? Not all the kids in class want to be programmers, and this isn't a programming class - it's Computer Science. We cover topics like hardware, the Internet, Cybersecurity, the history of computers, data analytics, etc. Not only do not all of them want to be programmers, not even all of them want to be in I.T. - they're just, you know, interested in computers (or in some cases they're in the course because their parents think they should be in it - I've had a couple of those students). We only spend 6 weeks on programming (we spend 6 weeks on each topic), or sometimes we might do it twice and spend 12 weeks on it, and that's it for the year! You can't teach Year 7 kids algorithms, pseudo code, basic programming concepts (variables, branches, and loops) and OOP as well in one year. Especially when not even all of them are interested in programming. It's just one topic we cover. OOP is something that shouldn't be covered until at least Year 8, preferably Year 9 (by which stage students have decided if they want to continue on this path or not, and the ones we still have left we start getting more hard-core... which is where the "us" I presume you're referring to come in).