[Edu-sig] BBC NEWS UK Education GCSE 'gender gap' sparksconcern

[Jason Cunliffe]

One of the thing which made me laugh/wince is how even the response is framed in
largely negativ/competitive terms. Instead of celebrating that the girls are
doing _well_, it's like ohno we have only a problem. Did you see the comment
that the boys are all watching too much soccer [football] on TV? Not to mention
all that cheap dutch Ecstacy they take on weekends >:-!

The higher percentage of boys still in "IT", also provokes the question of what
kind of teaching they are really getting and what should/could be done about it.

It would be intersting to know what the figures are for all of Europe this
summer... hell for the whole planet. That *would* be interesting.

Does anyone know how many teenagers in the world are exposed to Python and
where?

I've been semi-watching the Annenburg/CPB on late night Channel 25 for the past
10 days. The mechanical universe, Mitch Resnick on computational literacy with
'crickets' and Lego Mindstorms. One series focused on early numeracy and problem
solving. It had the teacher first put problems to the kids. Then the reverse.
Wow they really woke up. You could see their brains going into a different gear.
It made me think that that's a large part of what programming and especially
with a CLI-based system like Python is sort of like. when the kids were
'designing' prblems for teh teacher, she became the computer system and they in
their clusters became little alogothimic scripts. Fascinating



./Jason