The discussion has been going on for sometime now, and this week it was announced that ICT in schools would be re-developed to become more of a Computer Science program. I think its good that they are getting away from teaching about applications to teaching about how computers and applications actually work, but will it be done correctly?

As a computer science student at university I was at first confused by the idea, as to me it would be like teaching engineering or architecture at GCSE level. As I got over the loose use of the term computer science and started to think more about some basic programming, things got less confusing. Some important questions spring to mind however…

• The course will obviously have to be a lighter version of what’s taught in higher education but will they be given the proper background or will they just skip to the “nice” stuff? (Will they learn about the history of computers, binary, the actual hardware? etc)

• Is some of the maths too complex to be able to fully understand how their apps/programs work at that age? Does it matter?

• Will it be a compulsory programme or optional? I.e. Are all kids actually interested in computers/how they work? I suspect not.

• The computing industry changes so quickly, how will the schools be able to keep it up to date in order to keep it relevant to the days technologies?

• Do the teachers know enough to be able to teach it or will it be a case of the kids teaching the teachers?

• Will the course follow the traditional approaches of computer science or will it skip them leading to a new breed of techniques? (software engineering, artificial intelligence, networks, computer graphics, human computer interaction, operating systems etc)

• How will the course lead on to further education and university courses? Will it become a perquisite to have a computer science GCSE to study a computer science based program at university?

• Will there be in an increase in computer science graduates taking a teacher training course and going into to teaching at schools?

• Will teaching computing at school bring a more diverse population to the computing industry (currently predominantly male)?

If implemented correctly, studying computer science at school could lead to generations of school leavers who will be able to go straight into to work at a trainee level of an IT role or get a more in-depth education at an institute of higher education. Could this lead to more education based jobs in the computing industry?

If implemented incorrectly could we end up with computer science becoming the next maths in school (you either love it or you hate it?) Could students start developing and releasing software without regards to standards? In the long terms future could we see the demise of the computer industry with computer programming becoming a prequiste like english or maths?

Remembering back to the ICT lessons when I was at school, we learnt applications such as Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Access – but we also learnt ‘web design’, in Word. This is a worrying example of how schools can get things very wrong….