[ILUG] More Linux in the classroom!

[John P. Looney]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 07:25:01PM +0000, Michael Treacy mentioned:
> There already is a computer science curriculum in place - it is an option 
> for the Leaving cert Maths course. I don't know how many schools attempt it, 
> but since my school is involved in tecahing this pilot course from U.L., we 
> register our students as having done the Maths option. I don't know the 
> exact contents of this course, but when I last looked at it, we seemed to be 
> covering 99.9% of it in the other course.

 In the school we did it in, it was pretty poor. Granted that that was
about lumme...1992 or so, but we covered:

 COMAL (COBOL/BASIC hybrid - absolutely useless)
 Text based spreadsheet (close to useless)
 Art Packages (I can't say how close to useless this was)

 Thankfully, another teacher who did have a bit of a clue got us into C,
and after a few weeks, we were showing him some cool graphics stuff we
were doing at home (on Amigas - back then, 16 year olds didn't have PCs).

 The level of computing taught in schools then was disturbingly pathetic.
My little sister (about 16) is very very bright - sorta Lisa Simpson like.
However, she, and the rest of her 1200+ school don't get more than ten
minutes a week at a computer. I'd say the primary reason is that teachers
don't have the time or the training to show them how they work, and how to
use them.

 I love teaching, but I'm not very good at it, and would love more
practise at it (one of the reasons I agreed to take on the running/
organising of the monthly Dublin Meetings. And there are many ILUG members
that would love a chance to teach what they know to complete newbies.

 Could you recommend a way that ILUG people could actually get into
teaching in schools, in their spare time ? It would be excellent if there
was someone like the "teacher with a clue" in every school - it was an
hour or two a week, after school, learning cool stuff like pointers in C
and how hard drives worked. It's not something for everyone, but once you
get an idea of what you can do with computers at a young age...and I'm
sure there has to be one teacher in every school in the country that would
like an ILUG member to call out for an hour or three a week teaching them
stuff too.

Kate