English Schools To Introduce Children To 3D Printers, Laser Cutters, Robotics

First time accepted submitter Kingston writes "In a radical change to the English National Curriculum, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary has announced ambitious changes to the technology syllabus. Children will be introduced to programming and debugging from the age of 5. Secondary schools (age 11 and up) will be required to have a 3D printer and introduce children to laser cutters and robotics in the design and technology course. The much derided ICT (Information and Communications Technology) subject will be overhauled to teach 'several' programming languages to children so that they can 'design, use and evaluate computational abstractions that model the state and behavior of real-world problems and physical systems.'"

Won't work.

[FireballX301]

I was at a 'technology literate' middle school when Lego Mindstorms came out, and the school bought a few of them for the school computer club so people could 'program' and 'debug' the RCX robots. It was good fun, but all it taught to kids was a very rudimentary concept of program flow.

If you want to make kids tech literate, you deconstruct something they use in their every day lives, when they're old enough to be capable of it. A good example would be a high school course focusing on high level full-stack design - here's twitter, here's how their servers look like in a very simple way, here's their API, let's do a 2 month project to make a frontend. Or let's make our own mini twitter just for our class, here's a sql server and we can write the backend together over a month or so. That sort of thing would both engage kids and give them useful experience.

Re:Won't work.

[Microlith]

Therefore we should not, right? If the "unintelligent masses" cannot grasp it, we should not expose anyone to it. Am I getting you?