I forgot about BBCs, in fact; we had a couple in my primary school, and towards the end of my time there my teacher figured out that it was probably more useful to send me for some self-directed learning in the library rather than drilling me on multiplication tables I already knew inside out, so I spent some time with them. There were no manuals there though and I found the BASIC dialect just unfamiliar enough to be confusing at the time, though; so I never learned its graphics system properly, which is a shame since by all accounts it was much more capable than the Spectrum's. (The graphics system on the Spectrum was undeniably interesting, but mainly by having apparently been constructed out of solid arcana from beginning to end; IIRC the lore is that they used known-faulty parts on grounds of price and then at the design level worked around the fact that half the chip simply didn't work.)
Computing at the secondary level is a sad story nearly everywhere. GCSE IT is basically office skills and at least at my school there was nothing else available at that level (although the teachers at my school did put me on to the people running competitions and summer schools in Dublin, which made a huge difference to my life in many ways, not just academically, and I'm enormously grateful for that). I did A-level Computing basically out of "let me at a computer" desperation, and I think thoroughly confused my teacher by doing what amounted to a compiler-related project for my coursework (an attempt to machine-translate BASIC to Pascal; I'm not sure it ever quite worked right, but apparently it got 100% anyway ...), but to a first approximation university CS courses are only actually interested in their applicants having crammed in all the maths they can find. In some places I've heard of attempts to run actual software engineering courses at the university or even school level, but I don't have any direct experience with those. I think the result of the way we're doing it at the moment may bias the student pool towards those people privileged enough to be able to effectively teach themselves, which can't help my field's diversity problem.
I had no idea you knew hmw26! The social circle gets ever smaller. I met her either at DebConf or via mjg59, I forget.
I am indeed planning to teach my children to program once they have the prerequisite skills, at least if they show any interest at all (I did try briefly with B but I hadn't really prepared properly and he wasn't all that interested). Exactly how to go about that is definitely good material for a post, so I've added that to my calendar; thanks for the prompt!
no subject
Computing at the secondary level is a sad story nearly everywhere. GCSE IT is basically office skills and at least at my school there was nothing else available at that level (although the teachers at my school did put me on to the people running competitions and summer schools in Dublin, which made a huge difference to my life in many ways, not just academically, and I'm enormously grateful for that). I did A-level Computing basically out of "let me at a computer" desperation, and I think thoroughly confused my teacher by doing what amounted to a compiler-related project for my coursework (an attempt to machine-translate BASIC to Pascal; I'm not sure it ever quite worked right, but apparently it got 100% anyway ...), but to a first approximation university CS courses are only actually interested in their applicants having crammed in all the maths they can find. In some places I've heard of attempts to run actual software engineering courses at the university or even school level, but I don't have any direct experience with those. I think the result of the way we're doing it at the moment may bias the student pool towards those people privileged enough to be able to effectively teach themselves, which can't help my field's diversity problem.
I had no idea you knew
I am indeed planning to teach my children to program once they have the prerequisite skills, at least if they show any interest at all (I did try briefly with B but I hadn't really prepared properly and he wasn't all that interested). Exactly how to go about that is definitely good material for a post, so I've added that to my calendar; thanks for the prompt!