Schools’ Tech Curriculum Called ‘Boring’

That’s the headline of a Business Week article – but it’s something I’ve been talking about for, oh, three years now. The only good news is they’re helping spread word about the fact that 50% fewer kids are studying computer science than they did five years ago.

I have some suggestions that I’ve made before. Yes, I am offering solutions here at the top before presenting the article which (as people have been doing for 5 years) describes the problem.

Video games have ‘role in school’

No, parents and teachers will not like that suggestion. The data makes that point obvious. On the other hand, reality is not optional.

My conference presentation on this point from last year

Phrogram as presented at SIGGRAPH 2006

Kid’s Programming Language paper I presented at SIGGRAPH 2006

Here’s Business Week’s article describing the problem. Let’s solve it, shall we? It’s really not that hard. Computer science is fun.

June 17, 2008, 12:13PM EST
Schools’ Tech Curriculum Called ‘Boring’
Fewer and fewer kids in secondary schools choose to study computing, which threatens Britain’s tech future

by Natasha Lomas

The teaching of IT in secondary schools needs radically overhauling as it is putting kids off a career in technology, leading figures from academia and industry have warned.

The UK’s status as a world class IT nation is being threatened by a skills black hole which is getting bigger ever year as fewer and fewer kids choose to study computing.

Companies already have difficulty sourcing skilled IT staff—and government and industry bodies have warned thousands more skilled staff will be needed over the coming years to power the so called ‘knowledge economy’. But as numbers of computing students continue to drop off, the question is where is the talent going to come from?

Professor Lachlan MacKinnon, head of the school of computing and creative technologies at the University of Abertay, Dundee, has called for a radical overhauling of the curriculum in secondary schools as “boring” ICT classes which focus on Word and Excel are turning teenagers off IT as a career.

Deep technical skills are required to support the IT industry proper, which is not the same as learning the basic ICT skills that employees in all industries need nowadays, said MacKinnon.

The reality is that the IT industry needs more computing graduates than are currently being produced just to keep up with current demand—yet computer science student numbers have declined by around a quarter in the last three years so the future for UK IT looks very bleak indeed.

“We’re going to hell,” he warned. “It’s not a good place to be.”

Karen Price, CEO of tech industry skills body e-skills UK, also called for a radical overhaul of the curriculum in schools, warning: “The current curriculum is having an extremely negative impact on young people’s attitudes to IT.”

Price pointed out there’s been a 50 per cent drop in applications to computer science degrees over the last five years. “Young people are not choosing to study [computer sciences]. We’re sitting on a time-bomb, quite frankly,” she said.

According to Price, an A-level in computing is not a prerequisite for a single university computer science degree and she said this shows how little value is placed on secondary school IT qualifications.

Moreover, despite being vital to drive the UK’s knowledge economy, computing is not classed as a Stem subject (science, technology, engineering, maths), said MacKinnon, meaning higher education funding has been significantly cut back—to the tune of £100m in recent years.

Nor is IT eligible for SIV status (aka a strategically important and vulnerable subject) and the government support that would bring.

MacKinnon warned: “Without significant intervention higher education cannot meet growth targets [for the IT industry].” He called on the government to provide tax breaks and partner-with-industry to encourage internships and graduate entry schemes to get young talent into IT and help others transfer across from different industries.

The offshoring of entry level IT jobs has exacerbated the skills shortage by making it increasingly difficult for IT workers to gain the necessary experience to boost their skill level, he added. “Because we are not employing at entry level offshoring will kill our industry stone dead,” he warned.

Romans Used 20-Sided Dice Two Millennia Before D&D

Annoyingly casual journalistic license, but amusing anyway. Why would a glass die with unidentified non-Roman numerals bought in Egypt in the 20s be called Roman?

Romans Used 20-Sided Dice Two Millennia Before D&D

Many of us geeks take great pride in the ability to recite the history of role-playing games based on the 20-sided die, but what about the history of the die itself? Apparently it predates the original Dungeons and Dragons by almost two millenia.

Christie’s, auctioneer to the rich and famous, sold a glass d20 from Roman times. It was included in a collection of other antiquities that sold in 2003. The markings on the die don’t appear to be either Arabic or Roman numerals, but it’s probably a safe bet that it was used in a game of chance. As the auction catalog notes that several polyhedral dice are known from the Roman era, but remarks, ” Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.”

I wonder – how do you say “critical hit” in Latin? (Ed. note: “maxima plaga”)

The seller acquired this die from his father, who picked it up in the 1920s in Egypt. Sounds like the beginning of an Indiana Jones movie, doesn’t it?

And on that note, haven’t got a copy yet, but I have to check it out:

D&D 4rth edition has just released:

http://dnd4.com/

What interests me most about the new rules are the online tools, called (and sold) as DnD Insider. Check this out – about time, eh?

D&D Character Builder, a program that helps you create and manage your D&D characters. This program allows you to create a character for any D&D game, walking you through the process of rolling the dice and assigning your game statistics, as well as creating a visual version of your character using “paper doll” models and “drag and click” selections of armor and weapons. At the end, you can save your character and print out a character sheet, as well as go to any D&D tournament and call up your character for use, or use the character at the Virtual Gaming Table (see below). With this package, you get to create and store up to 10 different characters or up to 10 different versions of one character (your character at different levels), or some combination of the two.
•Exclusive D&D-related novels and short stories written by your favorite authors
•Real-World D&D Search Engines (find D&D gamers, game stores, tournaments, and events in your area)
•In-Game D&D Search Engines (find feats, spells, magic items, and other D&D-related topics)

Digital Gaming Table, a program that allows you to play D&D using the Internet as your kitchen table, with a viewable play surface, dice rolling, virtual miniatures, and voice chat. Now you don’t have to wait for your home gaming group to get together to play a game of D&D. You can still play your weekly face-to-face game, but now you can also play two or three more times a week by finding a game at the virtual table. Or, you might want to reconnect with your old gaming pals who long ago moved away-now you can all play together again on a regular basis!

How geeky is this? And this? And this?

New Phrogram Book at Amazon – make your own games!

Here’s a link to Jerry Lee Ford Jr’s new book at Amazon:

Phrogram Programming for the Absolute Beginner

Full disclosure: I’m one of the guys who invented Phrogram and its predecessor, the Kid’s Programming Language. But I don’t get a cut on Ford’s book!

Age of Conan and Fun Things To Do With Your Horse

No, it’s not what you thought I meant.

Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-rl3RPC_Mw

As the l33tsp33k comment says:

pwnage ^^

Wii versus PS3 versus XBox 360 Market Share May 2008

Yes, my posts from a year ago on market share of Wii versus XBox versus PS3 have been the hottest, most visited posts on my blog. So here after a year away are the May 2008 sales. In a nutshell, Wii is selling over 3x as many units as the PS3, and even more than that against the XBox. Guess who called that right way back when? Barron’s projections last week didn’t do so well, so replacing that with:

Video game sales up 37 percent to $1.12B in May

By AMANDA FEHD – 3 days ago

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — U.S. retail sales of video games, consoles and game accessories hit $1.12 billion in May, a 37 percent rise over the same month last year, driven by the chart-topping Grand Theft Auto video game, market researcher NPD Group reported Thursday.

Nintendo Co.’s Wii console is still the top-selling hardware unit, with 675,100 units sold in May. Nintendo’s DS handheld player took second with 452,600 units sold. Those units have captured the top two spot’s for four consecutive months.

Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 trailed with 208,700 and 186,600 units sold, respectively.

Hardware sales rose 34 percent to $428.6 million, while software sales rose 41 percent to $536.9 million, compared to the same month last year, NPD reported.

Take-Two Interactive Corp’s Grand Theft Auto continues to be the No. 1 selling video game, and its version IV, released in April, sold 871,300 units in May.

NPD analyst Anita Frazier said the success of Grand Theft Auto IV is not translating into big hardware sales for either the PlayStation3 or the Xbox 360 games consoles, “but there may yet be a lift in June due to gift-giving for Father’s Day and graduations.”

Sales year-to-date come to $6.6 billion and the industry is on pace to bring in revenue between $21 billion and $23 billion for 2008, Frazier said.

Who Is Chad Hurley And Why Is He Smiling?

Three interesting bits of news:

1) From Reuters:

The International Herald Tribune has launched a new twist on the podcasting craze sweeping media companies with a service that instantly generates an audio version of any article in the newspaper.

Full article is here, and the IHT service is here. The service is brand new and having technical difficulties – I’m betting a scalability problem as a few million people want to try it – but it’s a really interesting idea. If it turns out to work well, I’ll blog more about it.

2) In a meeting yesterday someone said “First thing I do every day is check what kind of crazy stuff went up on YouTube overnight.” Online and on-demand video is just getting started. Yeah, Chad’s having a good time. Check out how fundamentally social the site is – one key to why it’s working.

3) They’ve been working publicly on this for a while, but it’s finally happening: Microsoft, Yahoo test IM partnership. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” immediately comes to mind. There will always be a tension between companies – whose automatic instinct is to be proprietary in order to defend brand and market share – and customers – who would really really like it if systems were compatible, integrated and connected. This isn’t true only of IM, of course – cellular companies are having their own version of this around their “calling circle” features. As a customer, I know what I would LIKE to have happen – but the problem is, it seems like companies only consider things like this for the sake of marketing or competitive advantage.

VW Beetle, yep. 1350 horsepower, yep.

Very long and productive day today, and another one tomorrow, so this is a fun slacker blog for me.

Here’s a link to the article from Wired, and here’s the coolest photo:

Some highlights from the article:

Ron Patrick … mounted a $270,000, 26,000-rpm, 1,350-horsepower, Navy-surplus helicopter jet turbine in the trunk.
The jet jumps the Bug’s speed from 80 to 140 mph in less than four seconds

Despite all the muscle, Patrick doesn’t race. “I’m 49, so frying some 16-year-old who just saw The Fast and The Furious doesn’t do anything for me,” he says. But he has been known to light up Northern California’s freeways on weekdays between 2 and 3 am. “More than one late-night truck driver on I-5 has been passed by a low-flying comet.”

When he entered it in the Los Angeles Grand National Roadster Show in January, he was greeted with disparaging looks and scoffs from the gearhead elite. So when the winners started revving their V-8s, Patrick responded by firing up the jet and blasting out a 6-foot-long flame. Officials screamed at him to shut it down, and then banned him for life.

My hope is that this will so obviously kick the ass of any other “pimp my ride” ride that the fad will fade away. For another decade or two anyway. Yeah, I’m an optimist.

So who is The Schwartz and why is he blogging?

This is the most I I I post you’ll ever see here – apologies in advance. Just trying to introduce myself – which I’ll only need to do once.

I’m Jon Schwartz, but not the CEO of Sun. There are a surprising number of Jon Schwartzes in the world. When I took a job at Microsoft, there was literally a Jon Schwartz down the hall and around the corner, on the same team. We did a lot of shuffling misdirected email, snailmail and office visitors. I’ve been doing my own thing (again) since leaving Microsoft in 2001.

I’m a software developer, user experience designer (not graphics designer) and an entrepreneur. I’ve been a user experience specialist since 1992, when a friend first showed me how and why to run a usability study, and when Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer introduced me to Contextual Inquiry and Contextual Design through their training program. I use a lighter process of my own now, but the organization and discipline of their process is extremely valuable training.

I’m co-founder of Morrison Schwartz, Inc., a software development and consulting company, and The Phrogram Company, a brand new startup this summer of 2006. Along with Jonah Stagner and Walt Morrison, I’m one of the inventors of Kid’s Programming Language, which released in July 2005 and has been a real grassroots success story. Much more about that in later blog posts, of course.

I’m an optimist who, when necessary, reminds self and others that reality isn’t optional.

I’m blogging for several reasons:

1. I like to write, and this is a good way to make myself do it more
2. I do a lot of browsing and filtering of news and information on topics that interest me – and I hope that the filtering and linking I do will help others with shared interests to do their own filtering
3. Particularly in the fast moving tech world that I live and work in, blogging has passed the tipping point so that the interconnected web of bloggers is now the fastest, most credible, most thoughtful and most grassroots way that information spreads around the world (of course, that would not be true without the search engines, RSS, and the Internet itself – and the early adopters who got us past that tipping point)
4. I’ve been working professionally in the software world for 20 years, from huge companies to startups, doing development, project management, design, usability testing, marketing, documentation, and entrepreneurial startups, on PCs, the Web and mobile devices – so I have a lot of valuable experience and perceptions that I am told I should be sharing
5. I really like the idea that blogging in a principled, honest, useful, spin-free and non-PR way could turn out to be effective marketing and PR for myself, my companies and my products – while leaving me with a clear conscience

Hello world!

Hat’s off to Scoble for leading the way, and for inspiring and informing my own blogging manifesto. I’ll hang this on the wall nearby as a reminder, but am also posting it here, so you can hold me to it – and cause it might be useful for others.

1) Tell the truth.

2) Post fast on good news or bad.

3) Use a human voice.

4) Keep up on the latest software/web/human standards.

5) Have a thick skin.

6) Talk to the grassroots first.

7) People don’t trust press releases.

If you screw up, acknowledge it. Fast.

9) Underpromise and over deliver.

10) Know the information gatekeepers in your own company’s space.

11) Know the shifting of the nexuses in the global space.

12) Never change the URL of your weblog.

13) Don’t post when your life’s in turmoil and/or you’re unhappy.

14) If you don’t have the answers, say so. Then, find them and post them.

15) Never lie. Sooner or later you’ll get caught. Game over. Yes, this is a repeat of number 1.

16) Never hide information. See above.

17) Avoid spin. This isn’t TV. Here, people read, and think.

18) If you have information that might get you in a lawsuit, see a lawyer before posting, but do it fast.

19) Link to your competitors and say nice things about them.

20) Treat people the way you’d like to be treated. It’ll happen that way most times. When it doesn’t, their bad.

21) Be the authority on your product/company.

22) Know who is talking about you.