My first memory of a computer is of a hulking Acorn PC that dominated a corner of my primary school classroom. I remember crafting a story about ghosts on the beige keyboard before saving it to a floppy disk, which was filed away by the teacher for safekeeping. That was in 1995, and washing machines now easily outpower that Acorn. Yet it’s not only the gadgets in our schools and colleges that have advanced as tablets, interactive whiteboards and internal mail systems make relics of blackboards and personal planners. From September, Information and Communications Technology classes (ICT) will be replaced with Computing as part of an initiative to teach children how to create their own programs, instead of just learning to use other people’s.
Teaching pupils from the age of five to write simple algorithms and helping older pupils to learn programming languages is part of what Michael Gove, in October 2012, claimed was what Britain needs in order to ‘produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee — creator of the internet’.
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