I think this is a great move. Although it would be interesting to see how many people actually take the new subject.
The problem at the moment is as the article says, just get used to Microsoft GUIs and not know anything behind them. And what happens is people do other things in the lesson, as they get bored, or find it to easy so they don't even bother. The whole MS access stuff can be very dull.
They could even bring in sections of web development into the new course, ie setting up a LAMP environment and learning PHP. And not just learning to create table (shudders) based rubbish in Dreamweaver or the like.
Or on the comp sci/software dev side of things learn Java programming for Android. Although I would think that iOS dev would be a step too far at this stage - not sure?
Or maybe start teaching them a high level languages such as Python or Perl to help give them a good understanding of programming practises etc.
The problem at the moment is as the article says, just get used to Microsoft GUIs and not know anything behind them. And what happens is people do other things in the lesson, as they get bored, or find it to easy so they don't even bother. The whole MS access stuff can be very dull.
They could even bring in sections of web development into the new course, ie setting up a LAMP environment and learning PHP. And not just learning to create table (shudders) based rubbish in Dreamweaver or the like.
Or on the comp sci/software dev side of things learn Java programming for Android. Although I would think that iOS dev would be a step too far at this stage - not sure?
Or maybe start teaching them a high level languages such as Python or Perl to help give them a good understanding of programming practises etc.