T-Levels ... What sort of "Beauty Contest" would you run ?

Just a few thoughts arising from current work teaching CIE A Level Computer Science and Maths, and working on a whole set of BTEC Level 3 Computer Science presentational and text book materials ... and having, it seems, a bearing on T-Levels .

Kinds of topics that I have found more challenging to prepare materials for, and help students with past questions than I would have thought include, declarative programming (e.g. CIE Computer Science uses Prolog as its example language ... a language I love and which has an excellent open source development environment in SWI Prolog .. but which is not widely taught it seems ..) [ And here I must put a plug for a wonderful Prolog book "Clause and Effect" by William Clocksin ] . Object Oriented programming in Python also proved more challenging than I had expected ... especially topics such as slots, iterators and generators, and, also, multiple inheritance ... and no mention of UML in the recommended book, or, in the syllabus. Yet JSP (Jackson Structured Programming) is a key part of the syllabus ... so I had to "dust off" my old "structured programming course materials" .. Happy memories ...

If I was judging a "Digital Track T-Level" beauty contest ( I grant you it does not sound all that glamorous ... but, in those immortal words from the Cabaret(film) song 'If only you could see her through my eyes' .. then you surely would understand I do love and care about this area of science and technology.) I would like to judge the competitors on whether their proposals and example materials "had the wow factor", "that magic and aura" that would truly inspire and motivate and also provide the necessary resources to make teaching such courses a rewarding experience.

The "teaching flavour du jour" for arts / liberal academic types [probably till they hit a really meaty algorithm in pseudocode e.g. 'Heaps', or 'Red-Black' trees] is computational thinking ... A quick Google search will show lots of universities running all kinds of "liberal arts" related computing courses. But, how to "pin down" computational thinking ... [ that's academic qualifications for you .. things have 'got to be formalised'] ... or maybe not pin it down too much (?). All well and good ... but at some stage you need to write or specify real code that does real work and incorporate it into an economically valuable product (or not ?)

Maybe, possibly a bit heretical approach might be to, say, ask questions such as "how might you reverse engineer something and produce a clone at a fraction of the price", or how might you provide a distributed collective of smaller organisations as an alternative to Google or Amazon, for example, by analysing, reverse engineering and adapting the technology they use so that it would support a more distributed and co-operative form of global trading and working ? [Think "Small is Beautiful"]. I realise that there are vested interests who are "vehemently opposed" to any kind of "probing and poking around and performing all kinds of nefarious reverse engineering practices". However, surely, in a capitalist world one should be entitled to know the value of what one is buying and to decide if the price charged is indeed a fair one. I would put "reverse engineering" as one of the "most important" digital skills to have available in a "competitive marketplace". Yet ... there is no mention of "reverse engineering" as a subject worthy of study.

If I was to judge an organisation developing a T-Level Digital curriculum I would like to see, for example, Three or more sets of sample past papers with mark schemes. A whole set of Teaching Handbooks for the various topics (maybe not fully complete ... let's say 70% complete), and a whole set of Student textbooks and, also, a whole set of detailed project and practical assignment manuals. As I am writing this I am tempted to look at my "library of Nuffield Maths, Physics and Chemistry books ... they were not perfect .. but they tried to set a standard. However, the Nuffield project was for A Level univesity aspirants .. and here we are looking at courses aimed at those requiring to master a whole range of "technical digital" skills. If, indeed these skills are part of an technical apprenticeship of some sort then how about separating the "more academic parts" from the more "applied parts". For instance, let us take Databases ... on the academic side the usual Relational Database things could be taught. However, additionally, apprenticeship type teaching should include relevant technical certification e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle database training for those whose job requires mastery in this area. Taking computer networking as an example there is the pretty standard TCP/IP, ethernet and WiFi curriculum .. and this could be matched with e.g. certification in Cisco or in Juniper Networks technologies. [ And, maybe, though this might be considered a little too advanced an introduction fo SDN (Software Defined Networks) ]

Digital, however, also includes embedded systems an area not as well addressed in the T Level digital specifications as I would have hoped for. IoT and IIoT, we are told, is the herald of the dawn of the next technological age. Yet, there are precious few suitable teaching materials and practical handbooks out there. As an example, not that long ago I ran a C Programming course for technicians who maintain "flight simulators" all over the world. They needed to have a reasonable understanding of C so that they could modify some of the "flight simulator characteristics" and test them out approriately. It was a really enjoyable course to teach. However, a question that saddened me a little, towards the end of the course was "did I not mind teaching people like them who did not have great programming knowledge or talents" ... My answer was, that, to the contrary this kind of teaching was probably of most importance in "the great scheme of things".

Technical level qualifications need to be valued, and not considered as a "next best" alternative to taking a University Degree Course. They should also be developed, I think, with those contemplating a career change and acquiring new skill sets.

Do track down my email address and develop this theme further if you are interested. I grant you that this is a "rather off the cuff" set of observations ... though behind them I would argue that there is quite a lot of "real world" experience. One of the nice things about running a training and consulting company that develops, on the whole, fairly advance and highly tailored technical training courses is that we "acquire considerable insight into how technology and computing are applied over a wide range of industries and concerns".

Teaching advanced and up to date technical courses at college, apprentice and university level is not cheap, and the teaching staff need plenty of support and resources if they are to provide effective training. This does not bode well if the following example is representative of the "need for teaching establishments to make money". A recent real time Linux programming course I ran for a team developing real time robotics systems for working in hazardous (read highly radioactive) environments had quite a few members who had studied a Robotics MSc course at a UK University with a prestigious (well I was aware of its research and admired it) robotics department. That department was closed down, I was told, because it was too expensive to run. That same university developed a range of "arts and tourism and such" courses which were much cheaper to run and "could bring in the students and the revenues". Admittedly I do not know all the facts, but I do know that the group I taught was full of very able, enthusiastic and highly motivated engineers.