Headteacher’s guide to … inspiring young developers

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Tim

The Guardian’s ICT Leadership site says then it comes to the next generation of internet entrepreneurs, teaching schoolchildren how to use basic software is no way to ‘ignite passion’. Is it time to add computer programming to the curriculum?

The UK’s “great computing heritage” is being short-changed as a result of computer science falling off the ICT curriculum, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt.
Photograph: Echo/Getty Images/Cultura RF

“I was flabbergasted to learn that today, computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools,” said Google’s Eric Schmidt at last summer’s Edinburgh TV Festival. “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage.”

Is he right? Many people learn to drive a car, but do not need to be engineers, so why is computing any different? Schmidt’s comments partly reflect a generational difference. Those born like him in the 50s saw the birth of personal computers, and in the early days you had to be a programmer to do anything useful with them. Now computers are ubiquitous, the essential skills are not programming but how to operate them sensibly and use standard software.

Even if the curriculum does not require it, it is possible to squeeze in some computer science as an addition or to offer after-school clubs. There are some excellent resources, one being the Scratchprogramming language, a free download from the MIT Media Lab. Using Scratch, children create software by dragging visual blocks on the screen, with no need to write any code.

Another way to get started is by using applications in everyday use. Every web browser runs JavaScript, and there are powerful programming languages built into most word processor and spreadsheet applications.

The problem though is that the “standard software”, which does appear on the curriculum, may already be out of date. Pupils knowing more than the teachers is not uncommon and a course in Microsoft Office is unlikely to “ignite passion”, as Schmidt puts it, in the same way as the excitement of coding your own game and seeing it work.

I became a “real” teacher because one day a student got ahead of me.

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Tim

Teachers should focus on developing students, not programs.

Becoming a ‘real’ computer science teacher isn’t about staying one step ahead of your pupils in a technological arms race – it’s about knowing how to encourage them to learn and expand their horizons. So says Chris Monk in this month’s ICT Leadership comment in the Guardian.

I remember very well moving from teaching maths to computer studies as a young teacher. Within the week, students were coming up to me to show me magazine articles, talk about a TV programme they had seen or ask me if a program they had written was cool. Whereas in maths I felt safe (every problem in the text books had been solved over and over – this was the seventies, remember), computer studies was frankly alarming.

Of course, some people think that being one step ahead of the kids is an essential characteristic of a “good” teacher. Some students will use will use their knowledge that is outside of the teacher’s comfort zone, to challenge the teacher negatively, disrupt or threaten the progress of other students.

But I think truly brilliant teaching lies in another direction. You cannot stay ahead of them – all those kids with their endless enthusiasm, energy and countless hours of hacking.

Instead, we teachers need to get clever and think about what we bring to the table: you are an expert in learning first and the subject second, so stop feeling you have to compete with them.

Help them; communicate their successes, focus on what they achieve, not on what you don’t know, and enjoy helping them to explain what they have done.

Lastly, chat with colleagues teaching music, art and PE. How do they retain respect when students can play a violin better, paint better or are off for a football trial for Manchester United?

Once you have stopped trying to master computer coding in the 15 minutes between your last lesson and the staff meeting, you can start to take another tack.

Celebrate and develop your skill as a professional teacher, not a walking technical textbook. You are not running in a race, but working together in a team.

See your students as a resource not a challenge. Develop classroom strategies that turn them into positive contributors, not negative critics.

Promote a culture from the start where all learners can be teachers and where a teacher can admit to learning something. Pour in a little uncertainty, discomfort and risk taking and have fun!

Network; not for more advice about yet another computer language, but in classroom techniques that can broaden your skills and confidence to teach and organise an environment where students might learn even more than you will ever know.

Develop a classroom culture that values what can be shared, explained, used by all. Practise this yourself; don’t be the “expert” that is a target for a fall. Learn together, explore together, make mistakes together.

A real teacher recognises that many students are brighter and will achieve more than they ever will. A real teacher starts from the premise that they don’t know everything and celebrates learning new things with students. A real teacher gets a kick out of the unexpected and loves to be challenged.

I became a “real” teacher because one day a student got ahead of me.

Chris Monk is a retired teacher of computing and ICT and is currently
learning co-ordinator at The National Museum of Computing based at Bletchley Park

Why choose a Novatech computer with an APU from AMD?

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Charmaine

First of all, you’re probably wondering – what is an APU? To many readers it may be stating the obvious, but it may be helpful to explain the existing technology first. If you haven’t heard of CPUs before, you’ll likely recognise their brand names; Athlon, Phenom, Pentium, Celeron. CPU stands for Central Processing Unit, and it’s essentially your computer’s brains. It’s a massive electronic circuit, with millions of components – miniaturised down into a couple of centimetres square. It gives your computer the ability to make calculations; making all of your programs, games and applications work. The CPU has to communicate with all of the other hardware on the machine, and it uses ‘Buses’ to do that. A bus is essentially a channel for data. A faster, more efficient CPU allows your system to run more efficiently – but you probably already know all of that.

An APU is a new type of processing chip that will seriously improve the performance to price ratio (or, as it’s commonly known, “bang for your buck”) on your new system. First off, let’s clear up the ambiguous acronym. APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit and it really is that – an accelerated processing unit.

There are three main reasons why the APU is faster and more efficient than your existing CPU. First of all an APU includes an onboard graphics chip, removing the bottleneck between the graphics processor on the graphics card and the CPU socket – bypassing the speed-limited PCI express bus. This allows your computer to work faster because less time is spent waiting for the graphics chip and the CPU to communicate.

Secondly, the APU uses less power than the comparative CPU and Graphics card system. A system featuring an AMD APU uses around 40-60 watts for the APU core. A comparative graphics card and CPU would use around three times that.

You also have all the benefits of multi-core technology, giving you unrivalled multi-tasking ability – you can now watch 1080p video, whilst editing your spreadsheets, and rendering 3D graphics, with no slowdown whatsoever. Are you taking that with a pinch of salt? If so, watch this video from AMD comparing a high end AMD notebook APU with a high end Intel Core i7 notebook CPU. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Yr1uV3-pA – the performance difference is unreal.

Ok, so you understand what an APU is – so now you ask; why should I choose one from AMD? There are a number of excellent reasons. Firstly, in 2006, AMD merged with the well respected graphics card manufacturer ATI. This has allowed the AMD processor team access to the ins and outs of the most powerful graphics chips on the market today. In case you haven’t figured, they’ve used this technology in the new APU. The entire AMD APU range has support for 1080p High Definition video playback, straight out of the box. No graphics card required.

Secondly, AMD has a reputation for producing high quality processors at a fraction of the price of competitor’s models. AMD haven’t let you down with their latest release. The AMD A-Series APUs are available in Dual (Two), Tri (three) and Quad (four) core models, and the chips themselves are priced at a much lower point than the competing Intel models. We’re not kidding you – you can pick up the top end AMD APU – the “AMD A8 3870K” four core model designed for overclocking – for just £103.98 including VAT, and the lower end 2 core “A4-3400” version for just £49.98 inc VAT (prices correct as of 20/03/2012). See this for yourself by browsing our Components>Processors range.

Novatech, has produced a range of award-winning desktop computers suitable for home and business featuring these great new APU chips. You can see our entire PC range here: http://www.novatech.co.uk/pc. They are priced very competitively and built to the highest standard – and you already know about our world-class Aftersales support. If you’ve never used us before – just see what consumer review magazine Which? said about Novatech in 2011.

If you want to read more about AMD APUs, you can do so, here: http://fusion.amd.com

AMD. Novatech. Worry Free Computing.

Written by Ryan-Luke Drake, Novatech Technical Support.

We’re in the News. Again: “Novatech is expanding despite the economy.”

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Tim

A very nice article by Emma Judd in today’s Portsmouth News

Queuing computer customers top off an exciting year - Novatech is expanding despite the economy.

IT’S not often that a refitted shop attracts lines of customers queuing overnight to be the first in when it reopens. But the car park outside Novatech in Portchester became an impromptu campsite for just that reason.

The dozens of queuing customers were waiting for special deals to mark the shop’s reopening, and for the Novatech staff it topped of a remarkable 18 months. It has appeared in the Daily Telegraph’s top 1,000 Britain’s Brightest Businesses, and has come in second place behind Apple in a Which? Survey of trusted computer brands. There are also 50 extra staff on the books, and business sales have grown by 60 per cent in the past year.

And it’s all down to a change in direction, implemented by managing director David Furby. He said: ‘The business sales side was always something that was there for the developing, and it was a question of getting the right team in place and giving it a push. ‘We’ve now got a very good team and we’re having some great successes.’ Mr Furby said the firm’s success is particularly impressive, given the recent closure of Best Buys, and Curry’s being sold for £2 by its parent company.

And for Novatech, the decision to focus on supplying businesses with their technology has been the right one. ‘There’s a difference between needs and wants. A retail customer will want something, but a business will need something. We’re not neglecting our retail business – we have refitted our shop – but we have more potential for growth in the business sector.’

Novatech opened its doors to the public in 1997 with a small shop in front of a large warehouse on the Castle Industrial Estate. Since then it has added stores in Bristol, Cardiff and Reading. And its deals to mark the reopening of the Portsmouth store were targeted at retail customers – a half-price ‘gaming’ laptop for the first 10 people through the doors on Saturday, and similar money-off deals for the first 50 and 100 customers. The queue for the opening stretched around the warehouse. Mr Furby said: ‘It’s great to see such interest in what we’re doing.’ Novatech hopes to expand its staff by another 50 next year, reaching 300 employees by the year 2013.

PC Prattle: What is RAM?

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Ella

Not this kind of ram.

RAM is an acronym for Random Access Memory, and is a form of computer data storage. However, this name is somewhat misleading; today modern DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) is not truly random access due to it reading data in bursts. It is a kind of volatile memory, meaning that it requires power in order to maintain stored information (examples of non-volatile memory are a hard disk or flash drive). RAM quickly provides your PC with the data it needs on demand, this temporary data disappearing when no longer in use.

DRAM is the kind most commonly used in contemporary PCs, DDR3 being the latest – and fastest – generation of DRAM. DRAM stores each bit of data in a separate capacitor that is either charged or discharged (in other words representing the conventional computer-associated values of 0 of 1). As far as most people are concerned, RAM is all about speed: the more gigabytes of RAM you have, the more volatile memory your PC will have at its disposal and, as such, the faster it will run.

RAMtastic!

The future of RAM

High speed solid-state drives have been closing the performance gap between volatile and non-volatile memory since 2006. Additionally, several types of non-volatile RAM are in development, these utilising carbon nanotubes and the so-called magnetic tunnel effect (which is widely used in modern hard drive technology).

Intel Promise To Keep You Going Faster For Longer

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Paul

Two things which bother laptop computer users more than anything else are speed and battery life. If you want your laptop to last a whole hour on one charge you’ll have to adjust your settings to the lowest power usage modes meaning video and music are virtually unwatch/listenable and any programmes you have which are clunky when connected to the mains will grind more painfully than sand in your ice cream. If you bought a laptop you probably got it so that you could compute on the move then found that was fine for a few minutes then had to carry around a useless block of technology until you could find another power outlet. Funny, they never told you that in the adverts.

But perhaps all that’s coming to an end. Cloud computing’s supposed to be a great power saver as you’re not running any more than one programme but I’m not going to talk about that today. I wanted to talk about the new processors that Intel is developing with their partners over at Acer, Samsung, Lenovo and Asutek.

Intel Logo

Intel forecast that by December this year they should be producing laptops with fast, battery saving processors which will mean that their laptops can run all day on a single charge without compromising speed or efficiency.

Navin Shenoy, VP and GM for Intel Asia Pacific said that: “We’ve briefed just about everybody in that category of original equipment manufacturing and original design manufacturing. We want to reinvent the PC.”

Shenoy asserts that the partners that they‘ve hooked up with will produce an “incredibly sleek, powerful notebook” that can be always on.

As far as design goes, they are promising ‘sliders’ where sections of the machine itself slide to reveal the keyboard or ‘convertibles’ where the screen flips open and rotates so that it can be used as a normal laptop or tablet, depending on the user’s needs.

Intel say the laptops featuring their latest processors will be available between Christmas this year or 2013 and that as well as being thinner and faster, their production methods should be quicker too, meaning that they should be cheaper than 1^st gen new tech usually is upon initial release.