
Learning “computer code” will be offered in French primary schools - Furzel
http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2014/07/13/l-apprentissage-du-code-informatique-sera-propose-au-primaire-en-septembre_4456197_3224.html
======
Furzel
Quick summary :

The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary
school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher.

For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the
schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology
teachers.

Personal opinion :

While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack
formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and
squeeze some extra hours ).

~~~
aikah
In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, a high percentage of
french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, yet the
government want pupils to learn programming ? same old french bullshit.

Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and
parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody.

That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts
trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a
few hands and a total distrust of institutions.

~~~
mousa
I fail to see how the French kids' ability to write would be hurt by their
being introduced to programming. Maybe you think the solution to their not
being able to write is to sacrifice all other subjects to focus on writing.
Though I doubt the writing is that bad, if it's the case I'd probably axe
history before programming.

------
guylhem
As a kid in France (in the late eighties, quite young, but I can't remember
when precisely), I had some "programming classes", using Logo on Thomson
computers -
[http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html](http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html)

Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids
would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was
guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this
day.

I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with
the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting
thing was that it allowed experimenting.

Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them
in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences
between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the
interpretation, ie BUGS!!!

What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the
very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but
allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.

------
roma1n
It should be noted that France had a nice, Papert-style "programming"
curriculum centered on Logo in the eighties. Specific computers (hey, it's
France) were developed, such as the Thomson TO7.

And then... Nothing.

~~~
mackwic
You forgot OCaml, our national pride ! Our CS researcher have a large
expertise in proofs and static analysis with Coq, Coccinelle and the like.

~~~
aikah
yep, and TurboPascal and Delphi ,then I moved abroad to study and I didnt even
know C ...

------
olivierlacan
I learned basic electric circuitry in primary school in basically the same
context (extra-curricular activity the hour after regular classes end, once a
week) and it was great.

We learned how to solder stuff on circuit boards (yes, soldering irons, yes
some kids burned themselves, big whoop), how to use glue guns (again, I burned
myself a bit, nothing serious) to put components together when assembling
basic machines.

Can you even imagine the kind of amazing physical computing kids could be
doing with Arduino and Raspberry Pi these days. HTML & CSS seem like a no
brainer. I learned those in a "Technology" (in regular class hours) during my
last year of middle school (again, in Paris).

If it weren't for a sympathetic instructor who told us to do make a website
using FrontPage on anything we were passionate about (RTS for me at the time)
I'm not sure I'd be a web developer today. I think these kinds of a programs
are a great first steps to get kids excited about the web and/or basic
languages before middle school and high school classes (in our out of class
schedule) provide more thorough or complex introductions to programming
proper.

------
nawitus
Finland will[1] something similar. Programming will be taught from the first
grade upwards, but the few first grades will use teaching methods like
Computer Science Unplugged[2].

1\. [http://koodi2016.fi/](http://koodi2016.fi/) 2\.
[http://csunplugged.org/](http://csunplugged.org/)

------
pling
They're teaching my daughter python here in the UK at age 10.

I got taught BASIC (BBC BASIC) and some ARM assembler [1] in 1992 at school in
maths.

[1] ARM assembler because our maths teacher was moonlighting selling RISCOS
software and was quite helpful.

------
LukeB_UK
As of September, programming is a mandatory part of the curriculum in UK
schools.

~~~
igravious
I did not know that. Go UK :)

After a little digging here is an outline of the curriculum.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-
curricul...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-
in-england-computing-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-
computing-programmes-of-study)

~~~
MarcScott
Here's a better guide that teachers will be using to guide student learning.

[http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/origina...](http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/original.pdf)

------
GuiA
According to other sources, it seems like what will be taught is HTML:
[http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-
langage-h...](http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-html-
propose-en-primaire-des-la-rentree/)

The posted article also points out that the classes will be "périscolaire",
i.e. outside of regular class hours. This means that the teachers who teach
those courses will have to stay late. Only the super-committed teachers will
volunteer to do that - and it's not a given that there will be such a teacher
in every school. And even when there is, remember that the French school day
typically finishes at 4.30p. The teacher will have to attempt teaching a group
of exhausted pre-teens who just want to go home.

Additionally, again as mentioned in the article, almost a third of schools (16
000 out of 54 000) in France don't have access to high speed internet - and
many, many students from the lower social groups may not have
internet/computers at home. The government says that in September, half of
these 16k schools will magically get high speed internet access through radio
links. If history teaches us anything, those 9k schools certainly won't all
get working internet overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if most schools still
won't really have a functional internet by September 2015. And internet is not
everything either- those schools (mostly rural and/or underfunded districts)
are also very likely to have just a few, outdated computers for the whole
school, without a budget to address that.

As someone with a graduate degree in computer science, extensive experience
teaching CS/programming to kids/teenagers/adults, and an avid follower of work
done by Piaget, Papert, Abelson, etc., I'm absolutely all for exposing
children to computational ideas early, and using them to support and enhance
learning. I've taught many such classes with kids 6-12 myself, and it can be
done very successfully- even with kids who are not that interested in the
first place.

Unfortunately here, it seems like it's a reactionary measure taken by our
government to not be behind similar initiatives in the US and other countries,
without much thought given into it. The fact that it is called "apprentissage
du code informatique" rather than "apprentissage de la programmation" (or even
"apprentissage de l'informatique") is not ideal either; the first thing that I
associate it to is "apprentissage du code de la route" (classes that teach the
laws behind driving, which you have to take before your driver's license in
France), an association that I am sure many non-tech savvy parents or teachers
will make in some way. With the taste French government has for putting
certifications and "brevets" on everything, this is going to get silly quite
fast (I remember the B2i I had to take in middle school, a "certificate" for
internet & computers that we obtained after being taught what was essentially
an internet explorer class by a shop teacher who was way out of his depth).

Interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ministre de
l'Éducation is merging effective, proven 2-year university diplomas that
produce high quality computer technicians (who can then easily take on a
computer engineering/computer science degree) with tangentially related
electronic engineering ones, just to save money: [http://linuxfr.org/news/au-
secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-...](http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du-
bts-iris-informatique-et-reseaux-pour-l-industrie-et-les-services).

Things like the latter will definitely hurt France's ability to compete on the
international tech scene. On the other hand, I'm not sure teaching HTML after
class hours in schools were teachers are already overworked and lacking
critical resources will do much.

~~~
Furzel
Didn't knew about the HTML part, which is not such a bad news, when most of
the self taught programmers I knew started (real) programming it was either on
a calculator or because HTML was no longer enough. Even if I don't consider
HTML to be real programming, it's enough to be a first step in the rabbit
hole, and we all know how deep this hole can be if you care to keep digging.

As for the outside of class hour part, as far as I know it's not 'outside
class hour' literally but more reserved hours for non standard class
activities ( back in my time that's were I was first taught English which was
not a 'standard' class ). Besides, in primary school you only have one
teacher, which means most of them will not be half decent at teaching CS,
relying on volunteering teachers and/or parents seems like the good way to
present CS to young children.

~~~
antoinec
It's definitely not a programming language at all. But for young kids it's
much more appealing to create a web page with colors and animation than a
calculator in Python. And that's the goal, not make them able to program, but
show them what are the possibilities.

And, on the teacher's side, it's going to be easier to teach most of them HTML
rather than a real programming language.

------
tenfingers
In Italy I had the first programming introduction at 11, using Commodore 64
and the language used for teaching was Logo. Logo had to be loaded from 5"
floppy disks.

Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year),
we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead.

Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were
using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing
during these classes).

Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that
programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next
year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with
programming at all.

At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos
environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always
found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to
program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step
up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching
Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms,
while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could
inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot.

The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS
knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split
in two parts:

* basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle")

* applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle

Nothing much learned in these classes, if _anything_ actually.

I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the
sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher
about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages
bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for
asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I
only have shitty memories about these times.

Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear,
especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there
will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids
anything.

In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have.
You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little
time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system.

~~~
Furzel
I totally get your point, when your passionate about something, as a student
you need someone really good to teach you. And thus the issue when non
passionate teachers ends up teaching something because they have to and not
because they like it.

In the end I believe the point of CS lectures at such a young age is not to
actually teach people programming but more let them know that this field
exist, how it basically works and light the spark for some students. I've seen
a lot of people when I was in engineering school going 'Ho my god I wish I had
knew about CS before, would have saved me a lot of time' ( And some going the
other way ). Having these kind of revelation 10 years before can only be
something positive .

~~~
tenfingers
My main point here is that recycling a math teacher will not actually teach
anything about CS, it will just add a "practical session" where you just write
the same math concept with some boring language around it.

When I was a kid, for _some_ people the advantage was that they actually got
to turn on a computer and type on a keyboard for the first time in their life.

But nowdays, you don't really need to do that. Not in France at least.

------
sfermigier
That's terrific news.

The official word used is "coding", not "programming", which leaves a slightly
bad aftertaste.

Anyway, there is already an option for the scientific students in the last
year of high school, the so called "Computer and digital science"
([https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-
inform...](https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-informatique-
et-sciences-du-numerique-en-terminale-s)).

------
thrush
Google Translated to English:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fsociete%2Farticle%2F2014%2F07%2F13%2Fl-
apprentissage-du-code-informatique-sera-propose-au-primaire-en-
septembre_4456197_3224.html&edit-text=)

~~~
dang
Thanks. Hacker News is an English-language site. This is not to disparage
content in other languages; it's just what the site is. Posts not in English
will mostly be demoted, unless they're of major significance and not available
in translation.

------
mknits
Don't force, please. Period.

------
hayd
Haskell.

------
tonfa
Could someone fix the title? There is nothing about enforcing, this won't be
mandatory (and may not even be available in all schools).

~~~
dang
We've attempted to.

