It was too painful ...
 

MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch

[Closed] It was too painful to watch !

27 Posts
20 Users
0 Reactions
61 Views
Posts: 11402
Free Member
Topic starter
 

[url= http://politicalscrapbook.net/2014/02/tory-boss-of-government-coding-education-initiative-cant-code-lottie-dexter/ ]cronyism at it's worst[/url]


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 6:45 pm
 gogg
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

Yeah, but she's going to take a year to learn what a teacher can learn in a day, cos teechers is much cleverer. Init!


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:00 pm
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

lol - brilliant!

Another clueless Tory - Paxman is mellowing - he could have destroyed her!


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:03 pm
Posts: 7093
Full Member
 

It's only ones and zeros....

How hard can it be?


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:04 pm
Posts: 11402
Free Member
Topic starter
 

Paxman is mellowing - he could have destroyed her!

I don't think Paxman knows [s]much[/s]anything about the subject either.


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:10 pm
Posts: 33570
Full Member
 

The bloke who set up Microsoft couldn't either.
The point is to make sure that there are people in place who can.
There are things I do that my boss clearly can't, but he's still my boss, and gets paid a lot more than me.


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:47 pm
Posts: 11402
Free Member
Topic starter
 

The bloke who set up Microsoft couldn't either.

you think bill gates couldn't code ?


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:55 pm
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

Richard Branson can't play an instrument, fly a 747 or fix a train

Luckily for him, (and the rest of us) thats not his job!


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 7:55 pm
Posts: 11402
Free Member
Topic starter
 

Richard Branson can't play an instrument, fly a 747 or fix a train
Luckily for him, (and the rest of us) thats not his job!

yes but he knows what a plane, train and instrument is.


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 8:00 pm
Posts: 2259
Full Member
 

Typical of these young politicos - been apprenticed in a 'think tank' and had no real experience of life or work as the rest of us would know it, and now telling everyone how to live their lives / do their jobs. No wonder all the policies coming out of Westminster are about as much use and as relevant as a chocolate teapot!


 
Posted : 06/02/2014 11:10 pm
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

Hmmm, should I be concerned for my job if anyone could learn to code in an hour?

It's going to be a busy hour learning C#, SQL, CSS, HTML, JavaScript and all the other stuff that goes into a real website. Not to mention all the UI/UX stuff, plus Photoshop.

Should we have a FizzBuzz code competition here on this thread for the fun of it?


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 7:06 am
Posts: 251
Full Member
 

[i]The bloke who set up Microsoft couldn't either.[/i]

I think you'll find he could.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 7:29 am
Posts: 1143
Full Member
 

The bloke who set up Microsoft couldn't either.

🙄


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 7:40 am
Posts: 13767
Full Member
 

Excellent !

Why is my son going to uni for 4yrs to learn this coding nonsense, I think he's having me on.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 7:44 am
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

Why is my son going to uni for 4yrs to learn this coding nonsense, I think he's having me on.

In fairness, I'm pretty sure he's not doing 4 years at uni just to learn to code.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 8:07 am
Posts: 28
Free Member
 

Hmmm, should I be concerned for my job if anyone could learn to code in an hour?

If it is, as was stated, teaching a 5 year old how to write code for a birthday card then it shouldn't take much more than an hour for the teacher to learn, unless the teacher is clueless or they are using perl. 🙂


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 8:14 am
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

Ok, I'm not going to try and defend what she said, it's fairly much ridiculous. That being said, she's not implying that you can teach someone about C memory management or the differences between prototypical and classical inheritance in an hour. She's talking about giving people the basic skills which coding uses.

The fundamental tools of coding - basic boolean logic, iteration, recursion and conditionals say - are fairly simple to teach and to learn* and were certainly fairly overlooked in my schooling 10 years or so back. They also needn't take a huge amount of adjustment to teach as part of a maths syllabus and they are of great practical benefit.

*for a lot of people


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 8:22 am
Posts: 13767
Full Member
 

In fairness, I'm pretty sure he's not doing 4 years at uni just to learn to code.

What on earth will he be doing for 4 yrs? I hope I'm not funding his drinking social life then!


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 8:25 am
Posts: 23226
Full Member
 

If she was a munter would she have got the job?


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 8:29 am
Posts: 11402
Free Member
Topic starter
 

basic boolean logic, iteration, recursion and conditionals say - are fairly simple to teach and to learn

I can see the glazed gormless expression on her face now as you say that.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 9:41 am
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

rry_the_Spider - Member
If she was a munter would she have got the job?

Would you be saying that if she was a man?


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 9:43 am
Posts: 34078
Full Member
 

I wouldnt expect her to be able to fix the universal credit IT debacle

but Id like her to have a basic understanding of what shes supposed to be directing

I suppose that politicians all over really


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 9:54 am
Posts: 251
Full Member
 

My kids both learnt to code using Scratch.

Brilliant tool. Drag and drop but it teaches structure for simple sequences of commands really well.

My daughter won a Pico board; [url= http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/PicoBoard ]http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/PicoBoard[/url] in a school coding competition.

I was amazed what the children were all producing with such a simple toolset.

It's such a shame that it move son to teaching 'skills' like Excel when they reach secondary.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 9:58 am
Posts: 34078
Full Member
 


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 10:01 am
Posts: 0
 

In fairness, I'm pretty sure he's not doing 4 years at uni just to learn to code.

No hopefully they will teach him the fundamentals of design and different programming paradigms, rather than the hangup on programming languages which are just the means to translate the design to a form the computer can actually run.

And for the record HTML and CSS are not coding or programming.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 10:03 am
Posts: 28550
Free Member
 

Like shooting fish in a barrel. Who agreed to put her in front of Paxman? Presumably one of her team incredulous at her appointment.


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 10:06 am
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

[quote=JulianA ]Should we have a FizzBuzz code competition here on this thread for the fun of it?

In a single line?

for(int i=0;i<100;printf((++i%15)?(i%5)?(i%3)?"%d\n":"lottie\n":"dexter\n":"lottiedexter\n",i));

(I'm sure it's possible to do it shorter than that, but not bad for a quick attempt!)


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 5:09 pm
Posts: 0
Free Member
 

It was a bizarre Newsnight performance with both participants totally at a loss with the subject material!!!

Old Lottie is getting around a bit these days. She should switch to media and communications. Getting quoted seems a greater skill than understanding coding.

With such shallowness she could try some of the news channels....?


 
Posted : 07/02/2014 5:17 pm