Programming in School
I saw my first PC, when i was studying in Class 5(around 11 year old) at my School. We had a weekly computer period and all of us were very exited for it. We used to go to the computer lab, which was one of the few fully air conditioned room at our school. There were around 20 PC and we were 40. So, each PC was shared by 2 students. But we never complained, as they were still expensive piece of machine which was still not there at our home.
There was no GUI(Graphical User Interface) in it and we had to type our command in the command prompt. I still remember that we used to write small programs in DOS and save it to the floppy drives, which we used to buy from the local stationary shop.
Most of us also like the paintbrush application, which allowed us to paint in the otherwise dull command prompt. But in one hour you cannot learn much and we used to mug up the program. Actually this continued till Class 12 and most of us never really learnt coding. College is also the same story, but that for the next blog.
MS-DOS gave way to Windows 95 at school and DOS gave way to C and C++. Infact we had started learning C++ from Class 9, but it was always mugging up programs and concept to clear the theory papers. We learnt everything from inheritance to polymorphism to classes, but actually never learnt programming.
In our +2(11th and 12th) we had a choice to take Hindi or Computer Science and everyone took Computer Science as it was a theoretical subject and you can get 95+ marks out of 100 easily in it. It was not possible with languages.
I don't know whether still programming is taught in schools in this way, but will soon find out as my Kid is in 1st class. He have a weekly technology class, where the teacher is now teaching how to press keyboard of the laptop. Hoping he will learn to develop logic, which is the basic of programming and create any program with the basic of the language. But i am in no hurry as i thing 10 is the right age to start serious coding, when every student learn the basics of English language.