More on the Year of Code
By Dr Chris P. Jobling
My Progress on the Code Academy Code Year Open Course
As mentioned earlier, code and how to create it has become a bit of an early meme this year. As reported by the BBC and The Guardian, UK Education Secretary Michael Grove has announced a shake up of the Schools ICT curriculum which will allow schools to teach programming. The Guardian newspaper has also just launched a Digital Literacy Campaign, co-sponsored by Google, with the aim of creating a new generation of coders, and Michael Kölling and the Code Academy launched open courses in Java (with Greenfoot) and JavaScript (see 2012: Year of Code? post for links). There’s also the Raspberry Pi, a really cheap microprocessor that it’s Cambridge developers hope will be the 21st century equivalent of the 1980s success the BBC Micro.
Last week I followed along with Michael Kölling’s introduction to Java (I’ve not had chance to catch up with this week’s yet) and I also worked through the first four exercises published by the Code Academy (see Bragging Rights on post image). Neither were too challenging to me as I already teach this stuff, but it’s still surprisingly satisfying to earn badges and points!
Of course The Guardian and Google’s and now the UK Government’s definition of Digital Literacy doesn’t match JISC’s, and therefore my University’s, so there’s a whole debate waiting to be had there!