As an aside, nobody writes BBC BASIC on a C64. You write the C64 variant. BBC BASIC was specific to the BBC Computers. Many magazines and books had different listings for each machine. ;-)
I was awarded one of the first A* grades in the UK for GCSE Computer Science, because I was in the first year that was on the National Curriculum. My understanding is that within 2-3 years, the curriculum changed dramatically
In my generation, Logo programming was taught at primary school. BASIC was taught in "first year" (which is now Year 7), at secondary school. Most programming was taught though if you elected to do Computer Science in Year 10 onwards, and the GCSE required a project to be undertaken. Mine was a sort of theatre booking system.
I remember when about 14 talking to my deputy headteacher about the future of teaching computer science. She was convinced that it would die out before I graduated university because "computing would just be in every lesson". That was the direction the UK gov did take, and a wrong call IMHO.
By the time I got to A-Level, the curriculum was a mess. Most pupils had Amigas and Atari STs at home, the labs at my college were full of PCs and the programming part of the curriculum was QBasic led, but the text books were still talking about mainframes and punch cards.
The government seems to have tapped out and waited to see what would happen next. In a decade of doing STEM outreach, I found it infuriating that no real curriculum existed in schools other than how to use office tools. That seems to have changed now, but it's not exactly a great curriculum, still.
> As an aside, nobody writes BBC BASIC on a C64. You write the C64 variant.
My mum only knew BBC Basic, so that's what was loaded first and I remember it distinctly. It may have been emulated, it certainly wasn't the default thing that came up when you powered the unit on, you had to "load" it from a tape deck and it took 30 minutes.
As an aside, nobody writes BBC BASIC on a C64. You write the C64 variant. BBC BASIC was specific to the BBC Computers. Many magazines and books had different listings for each machine. ;-)
I was awarded one of the first A* grades in the UK for GCSE Computer Science, because I was in the first year that was on the National Curriculum. My understanding is that within 2-3 years, the curriculum changed dramatically
In my generation, Logo programming was taught at primary school. BASIC was taught in "first year" (which is now Year 7), at secondary school. Most programming was taught though if you elected to do Computer Science in Year 10 onwards, and the GCSE required a project to be undertaken. Mine was a sort of theatre booking system.
I remember when about 14 talking to my deputy headteacher about the future of teaching computer science. She was convinced that it would die out before I graduated university because "computing would just be in every lesson". That was the direction the UK gov did take, and a wrong call IMHO.
By the time I got to A-Level, the curriculum was a mess. Most pupils had Amigas and Atari STs at home, the labs at my college were full of PCs and the programming part of the curriculum was QBasic led, but the text books were still talking about mainframes and punch cards.
The government seems to have tapped out and waited to see what would happen next. In a decade of doing STEM outreach, I found it infuriating that no real curriculum existed in schools other than how to use office tools. That seems to have changed now, but it's not exactly a great curriculum, still.