you will not have to sit through any more of me. I promise

Awwww :-(

If you want something a bit more advanced than GCSE-level, why not have a look at http://www.gif啪啪视频.org/archives/1913

That’s like seeing a Public Information film on TV one day about learning to swim and saying, “Why is the government only interested in swimming? My son finds swimming boring. Why not do free diving? Or golf?”

It’s hard for me not to respond to that with heavy sarcasm, given how many people have been working themselves to death on our educational offering. I am trying my best.

Of course GCSE is not the only area of the syllabus we’re working on. It is the first we’re *publicising*, though. And if you think we haven’t been very busy inspiring young people to enjoy programming and being creative – well, I don’t think you’ve been following this blog very carefully at all. Just this week, Clive’s running hours and hours of CPD for teachers; we’re attending Technocamps Wales; we’re talking to and helping about a bajillion schools; and we’re running the Google Pi project. The community’s doing lots of work too.

If you’re worried about education, so should you. Get involved. Volunteer.

(1) If the aim is to inspire young people to enjoy programming and being creative, why define it around the achievement of a GCSE. When I mentioned this to my son, who is 13, he couldn’t be less interested.

(2) As programming is one of the main aims why reinvent the wheel. Python is installed as the main educational so use something like Udacity as a kickstarter. For example https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101 then onto Web development or testing or even the logic behind the self driving car. Yes utilise the pi as an integral part of the process but don’t forget to embrace other available solutions

Actually, as a GCSE 啊啪啪视频 teacher, everything you said there I covered in my theory lessons. Some of it was aimed only at the more able students with a “this isn’t part of your exam, but as you’re interested” warning, but it was all mentioned. The OCR GCSE spec covers lots of potentially quite hard topics but mostly in superficial detail (for instance xor isn’t on it, but and/or/not is)

* GCSE is a method hardly used outside the UK. I hope the 未成年啪啪视频 will find the time, and finances, to integrate the program with what’s locally available and required to the student so (s)he can obtain locally available qualifications.

* Given the proliferation of optical media and it’s low cost, it would be wise to consider making the video’s available as download (DVD ISO) as well as pre-burned DVD sets, ideally with all video’s covering a specific topic per DVD. Video’s may cover more then a single topic, I see no problem in having multiple instances of this video on multiple disks: DVD’s are cheap.

* Include instructions on how to set up a separate LAN for showing these video’s, so that their use doesn’t eat bandwidth the educational institution doesn’t have. Content streaming from a NAS, for instance.

* Someone mentioned the youtube-dl tool to extract video from this medium. Having used it myself, I can recommend it: first, it’s a Python program and second, it’s already in the Debian repo!

* English is the language of choice for computer programming, but it’s not used natively in large parts of the world. Translations are required, unless you want to turn the computer course into a crash-course in English too ;-) Spanish and Portugese cover most of Central and South America, French is widely used in parts of Africa, and then there’s Hindi, several African and Asian languages and dialects and of course Chinese. Good luck ;-)

I hope the program will be a success, most likely I’ll be having a look at it when it’s acquired a stable status. :-)

I agree it has to be pitched at the right level, which may involve simplifying some things. I’m just really pleased that this stuff is getting back into schools after a long break.

I don’t know how useful this background information is for teachers, but the relationship between clock rate and performance is actually quite complex these days. As has already been pointed out, some instructions take more than one clock cycle. In some circumstances, the CPU can also execute more than one instruction in a single cycle (which is called superscalar). The CPU may also execute two distinct streams of instructions (hyperthreading). This also results in a single CPU core executing more than one instruction per cycle.

You also have to consider the speed of devices outside the CPU. The time taken for resolving a cache miss is independent of the CPU clock speed; it depends on the speed of the computer’s memory. The effect of memory performance will depend on the workload. If you are running something that doesn’t generate a lot of cache misses, you should go for a fast CPU and not worry about the memory. If you are generating random accesses to memory that tend to miss the cache, the opposite is true.

Presumably GCSE 啊啪啪视频 students don’t need to be told all this, but at least it will help you deal with the kid who tries to catch you out. :)

It’s funny how much this has changed since I did 啊啪啪视频 GCSE! At that time, common computers had one CPU core with no pipeline, no cache, and they drove the memory directly at the CPU clock speed.

It’s good to see the education efforts ramping up. As always, the devil is in the detail, and the nice thing about online learning is that you’re not so constrained by the time limits of a classroom so you can afford some luxury of teaching to a bit more depth. For example, start with clocks as little slabs of piezo crystal (open up a cheap crystal earpiece and show the little Rochelle salt crystal), oscillating so many cycles per second, then onto Heinrich Hertz, and then introduce SI units kilo, mega, giga, leading to MHz and GHz. I don’t know if that would tie in to the physics GCSE, and maybe they don’t teach powers of ten in maths classes these days?

Oh, and carbonic acid is H2CO3 – it ain’t no acid unless its got some protons (H+) to give away.

Neil

Thanks Whaleygeek — you get it. The 未成年啪啪视频 is working hard to produce usable, interesting and rigorous teaching and learning resources and to support teachers in the switch to a 啊啪啪视频 rich 未成年啪啪视频 (the online course is just one thing that we are involved with).

Your advice to ” Roll your sleeves up, get involved” is spot on, and of course there are many avenues to do this — not just through the 未成年啪啪视频 — but organisations like 啊啪啪视频 at School, STEM Ambassadors, Code Club, Coder Dojo, Young Rewired State etc or just helping once a week at your local school.

***N.B. I would like to point out that I am *only* in the preview videos because I was the nearest available (ex)teacher! The remaining videos will feature a wide range of teachers and educators and you will not have to sit through any more of me. I promise :) ***