[Yr11 Information Technology] Re: Unit 2 Outcome 1:Programming

[Kevork Krozian]

Hi Steven,

 Thanks for your input. It is great to be kept up to date with the
direction of the Universities. 

I think back to the mid to late 80s ( yes, I am that old ! ) when
schools brought in Computer Science in Yr 11 and 12 which were really
the Computer Science Uni course I did in the early 80s filtered down . I
remember fondly the different searching algorithms , min and max search
times ( comparisons ) , file structures, recursion with the Towers of
Hanoi problem, functions and procedures and parameter passing, numerical
computations, data structures ( linked lists, binary trees, balanced and
unbalanced trees ) ....  

And then with the advent of the VCE in 1990 the idea was that we are
not only teaching students to prepare for tertiary courses but to also
have a breadth of knowledge not restricted to excelling simply for
tertiary selection. 

In view of or even despite the above, do you have a strong opinion
either way as to what secondary schools should be teaching in terms of 

   1. The IT course content in general
   2. The programming languages taught at each year level
   3. The degree of difficulty students should achieve at each year
level 
   4. Do they need ANY IT before they come to you 
   5. What prerequisite would you like to set for Uni candidates coming
to your course ?
   6. Is there anything you wish they could "unlearn" before they start
your course ?


 I would be very interested in your perspective .


With thanks





Kevork Krozian
IT Manager , Forest Hill College
k.krozian at fhc.vic.edu.au
http://www.fhc.vic.edu.au
Mobile: 0419 356 034

>>> sb at csse.unimelb.edu.au 13/06/2007 1:15 pm >>>
>  Our students do Flash in Yr 9,  VB.NET in Yr 10, PHP and MySQL in
Yr
> 12 so I am thinking I might go with either :
>
>    1. Basic PHP/MySQL or
>    2. VBA behind Access or Excel or
>    3. ASP in web pages or
>    4. java  or
>    5. javascript or
>    6. python

As I've mentioned previously on this list, we've chosen Python in our
new first year IT subjects at Melbourne University.  Sydney Uni also
teaches Python in its first year IT curriculum.

More detail on our new first year informatics subjects is available
here:
  http://www.informatics.unimelb.edu.au/ 


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