callum breaks things
DESCRIPTION
Callum breaks things. Kate Glover. Just finished first year of BSc( Hons ) Internet Computing course at University of Brighton with view to continuing to PGCE to teach secondary school ICT! Formerly spent 8 years as a Network Technician at a large FE college. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Callum breaks things
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Kate Glover Just finished first year of BSc(Hons) Internet
Computing course at University of Brighton with view to continuing to PGCE to teach secondary school ICT!
Formerly spent 8 years as a Network Technician at a large FE college.
Spent 2 of those years also teaching adult ed. (Web Construction) and Functional Skills ICT.
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This is Callum (at BlackBerry Jam)
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Callum is 17 He is a co-founder of C2Development
www.c2dev.org
He is both competent and confident coding in HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, C, C++, C# and more.
Callum has grown up in a “technologically positive” household.
Callum breaks things...
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Breaks things?
Callum has been encouraged to “play” with computers by his step-father, who is an IT Trainer for a large private company.
If he broke things – he was not chastised, but encouraged to learn how to fix them.
His computer at home wasn’t “locked down” – just re-imaged if he had nuked it beyond reasonable repair.
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How has this made me Rethink ICT? Stop locking down workstations so that students
can’t do anything with them.
With Windows Deployment Services etc. a classroom can be re-imaged quickly and easily, in the time it takes to do your summary, switch classes, and run your re-cap – or during break/lunch.
This would permit students to be more adventurous, and learn that computers do not have to be handled with white gloves.
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Why I think this should work Callum is now employed as a software
developer for a company in America – teleworking from my living room and taking home more money than I did when I was working five jobs!
Callum appreciates the value of backing up his work, server/workstation environments, and that computers can be tools for facilitating innovation and creativity – rather than just for writing letters and playing games.
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Nick
Nick is representative of most of my fellow students at Uni.
He is a hard-worker, and as a result, generally quite a high achiever.
Nick drops loads of marks in his programming exams, because he can’t problem-solve for toffee...
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A recent exam question *---- We had to find 5 faults in a
**--- pre-written program which***--generated this pattern, of a ****- height/width determined by a***** user-defined number.
One of the faults could be spotted by comparing these two lines of code:
System.out.println(“*”); System.out.print(“-”);
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The answer Running the program and examining the output
showed that there was no more than one * per line, whereas the –s appeared grouped horizontally on the lines as the brief required.
I revised my code so that both lines read System.out.print rather than System.out.println to see what happened – knowing that I could put it back if it didn’t work.
It did work – marks won, on to the next question!
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The problem
None of the fellow students I had spoken to after the exam had fixed that fault.
They were outraged when I told them what I had done to fix it. “We’d never seen print instead of println before! How could we have known?”
They had missed the point.
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The problem
Having helped out quite a bit – I knew that their problem-solving abilities were somewhat lacking.
The same was true across their academic experience. Most of them saw a problem, and considered it an “end point” rather than a mere hurdle which could be overcome with logic
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How this has made me Rethink ICT We need to introduce logical approaches to
breaking down and solving large/complex problems at a much earlier age.
Run, check, analyse, fix, run, check, analyse, fix...
Introducing programming in schools should certainly help with this.
Primary schools may need to play a larger part in this too. Perhaps introduce “machines” which need to be fixed one step at a time.
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Why I think this should work Myself and Alex (a fellow student)
DO already do these things.
We have both come from non-technological families, but with a background of playing with Meccano / LEGO Technic and writing our own computer programs (albeit in BASIC!) from primary school age.
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Any questions?
Website: www.kateglover.co.uk
Twitter: @lifson