[Year 12 IPM] ICT and IT? Justification

[Michael Walker]

>One of the other things that worries me a little, is that whenever we come up with a Year 7/8 course for example (and I admit to being very guilty here) we fall back on those hoary old chestnuts - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and (for heavens sake) Access. It is little wonder that other KLAs cry out that they can do that as well as anyone else - a lot of it is monkey see monkey do. And don't get me started on Access -no one in their right mind would ever use seriously in business or anywhere else
for that matter  - IMHO.

Hi Peter and everyone else,

May I suggest you're being a bit harsh on poor old Access. As for your point of not using it in business or anywhere else, our report writing package (Markbook), our timetabling package (First Class) and even our roll marking package (Rollcall) use Access as their database. Although Markbook has had the option of an alternative SQL database for the last few years, it was originally Access only.

In addition, if schools restricted their use of software to only things that will be used in business, that would rule out most programs used to illustrate general principles at levels students can understand or in ways that are motivating. Following this logic, nobody in their right mind would use Kahootz to illustrate multimedia, Gamemaker or Logo (or in the old days Pascal) or even poor old VB (depending on who you listen to) to illustrate programming principles. Other subjects are no different. For example, who uses long division or even French in the "business world" or "real life". Yet the principles are important for building stepping stones to the real world principles used in more complex applications. In the case of Access, I used it at uni in learning basic relational database principles before the course moved us onto Oracle. The principles used in Access are no different to using Oracle or other more industrial databases except the GUI is more friendly than writing out lines of code in text files to create tables and associate them.

In the case of students, I would argue that it potentially could be more motivating (yes I'm being serious!) than the far more comonly used Excel with a little thought and imagination. With a little knowledge of VB script (already used/learned in VB and VB.net), students can easily create ASP pages to access an Access database. Even without the ASP, you could do something similar with Access form and reporting functions (although I personally find them clunky and harder to use than HTML and ASP, and I suspect the idea of having a web page that they can get their friends to use and fill in would be far more motivating). To be honest, I'm surprised that in some ways I have heard little about this sort of thing on this list given there is huge overlap with what some schools teach anyway (ie VB and HTML). Especially given you can easily set up databases relating to many things students already do in class when they are meant to be working... (eg online quizzes of their friends with summary pages, "ideal job" website which looks up a database based on input and some form of obscure calculation and gives a silly reply, even a very simple blog and guestbook which allows online blog entries and comments from others, and I'm sure others can think of far better ideas). Perhaps people think it is too hard, or would take too long with the students who are referred to IT subjects? Admittedly some of this may be seen to be beyond the scope of year 7 and 8 courses crammed with Word and Powerpoint, but I can see a good use for it in years 9 and 10 IT subjects in conjunction with programming.

Michael Walker.