I can’t help feeling that giving some of my grandkids a BBC micro, and cassette player, and the BASIC manual would help them learn so much. Sadly I’d have to lock them in a sealed room for a year as well, they would get so bored these days I bet. They just don’t appreciate quite how much happens behind the scenes on their gadgets. The layers and layers of code and hardware. Shame…
This was sort of the premise behind the Raspberry Pi project. To give users access to low cost hardware to teach computing fundamentals.
My son is currently doing A Level Comp Sci and it's a totally different course from the version I did in ~1984.
While technology has moved on the fundamentals are the same and really need to be taught as the foundation before all else.
@simonzerafa @revk I very much believe CompSci should be a maths heavy subject in much the same way that Physics is. Different topics though. Logic, Groups, Number systems, Linear algebra (through matrices and tensors), etc, etc.
An "Applied CompSci" course would include the software development.
"Computer Engineering" would be focused on larger scale systems, networking, and infrastructure.
None of them would be about computer literacy.
@weebull @simonzerafa @revk Mine was, as appropriate to particular subjects (Cambridge, 1970s).
The hardest bit for me (we didn't do any crypto) was error correcting codes. I had to ask around to find someone who was prepared to give a supervision on that topic ... and the person who volunteered didn't understand it either off the top of his head but we worked through it together and I did, then, understand it. Forgotten it all since of course.
The bits of maths I have definitely used several times since include calculating the transitive closure of a sparse connectivity matrix ... which I've even had to code in SQL (in a table with a parent-child self-referential "foreign" key this gets you all the ancestors or all the dependents of a particular row).