My mum used to know him - until she retired a couple of years back, she was one of the departmental secretaries in the psychology department at Nottingham. I don't think they got along particularly well.
Professor Shadbolt said it was partly due to poor teaching and called for a thorough review of the way in which it is taught in schools I was chatting to a friend of mine about this recently (he's a senior lecturer in CS at UKC, and usually gets roped in to help with undergraduate admissions). He made the point that in schools, ICT is pretty dull - basic word-processing and spreadsheets, and similarly unenthralling stuff. So the intelligent and creative people who `should' be doing CS at university aren't, because they think it's tedious, while the people who `shouldn't' (who think that it'll be like ICT - ie boring but easy) are.
He's noticed an increasing number of people who grumble when he sets a programming assignment - comments such as "do we have to? I don't like all this programming stuff..." are quite common, apparently. His initial response was along the lines of "look, you're doing a module called `Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming' on the `BSc Computer Science' degree course, in the Department of Computing. What on earth did you think it would involve?" and then he looked into it more deeply and found that at least some of them thought it would involve word-processing and spreadsheets, because that's what computing was about at school.
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Date: 2006-11-18 01:17 pm (UTC)Professor Shadbolt said it was partly due to poor teaching and called for a thorough review of the way in which it is taught in schools
I was chatting to a friend of mine about this recently (he's a senior lecturer in CS at UKC, and usually gets roped in to help with undergraduate admissions). He made the point that in schools, ICT is pretty dull - basic word-processing and spreadsheets, and similarly unenthralling stuff. So the intelligent and creative people who `should' be doing CS at university aren't, because they think it's tedious, while the people who `shouldn't' (who think that it'll be like ICT - ie boring but easy) are.
He's noticed an increasing number of people who grumble when he sets a programming assignment - comments such as "do we have to? I don't like all this programming stuff..." are quite common, apparently. His initial response was along the lines of "look, you're doing a module called `Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming' on the `BSc Computer Science' degree course, in the Department of Computing. What on earth did you think it would involve?" and then he looked into it more deeply and found that at least some of them thought it would involve word-processing and spreadsheets, because that's what computing was about at school.