[Year 12 SofDev] choosing a language for 2008

[Steven Bird]

Thanks for your replies, Kevork and Mark.  I don't think there's an
easy solution, but I wonder if there's always going to be such a
disconnect between IT teaching at year 12 and "year 13".

On 9/18/07, Mark Kelly <kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au> wrote:
> I'm perfectly happy if during the year my kids just get their heads
> around arrays, loops, scope, basic functions, data structures, interface
> design and simple file I/O.

Right, its hard to do more than this when kids have no previous
programming experience and little motivation.  We have an easier time
of it at tertiary level given that a much narrower range of students
has opted into our courses.

Still, I'm jealous of other VCE subjects like Chemistry and Physics
for their solid theoretical content (e.g. gas stoichiometry, the
Lorentz transformation), and wonder if secondary students will ever
get exposed to computer science at a similar level.  After all, most
kids have access to a computer from an early age, and not a chemistry
set.

In the meantime, I'm trying to persuade more of our CS graduates to go
into secondary teaching.

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/