The BBC Micro and the Raspberry Pi, two devices designed to help teach coding in schools. We investigate the link between the two…
When the MP Elizabeth Truss recently reiterated her party’s desire for children aged 11 and over to learn to program in two languages, her comments were met with some scepticism. It has been the same since education secretary Michael Gove spelt out his plans in July for children to be taught about the definition of algorithms and to be creating and debugging simple computer programs between the ages of five and seven.
One of the accusations some internet commentators levelled at Truss, the Conservative parliamentary under-secretary of state with responsibility for education and childcare, was she would, most likely, be unable to code herself. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ seems to be the mantra among detractors of what will be a revolutionary approach to the teaching of computing in schools.