[pseudonimble]

My experience with IT education in the UK is genuinely atrocious. During secondary school we made a spreadsheet in Excel and a couple of Word documents. The closest thing to programming was a picture of traffic lights we had to "programmatically" operate. For a single hour lesson. And that is it. We were lucky if our computers even turned on.

[wazoox]

The problem is that teachers are often completely computer-illiterate. This is a chicken-and-egg problem; you won't teach proper, interesting computing activities without competent teachers.

[_delirium]

Although true in general, some subset of students will figure out interesting things, and then show them to others, if you at least put them in an environment where that's possible. My middle-school computing class was not particularly well taught, but the curriculum included a few simple things in Hypercard, and Hypercard was the kind of environment where students who finished the official assignments early could find all sorts of other cool things to do in it.

That does also require having free time. There's a trend lately towards assuming that any free time students have is wasted time in which they could be learning instead of goofing off, which I'm not sure is the right way to look at it.

[morsch]

We programmed abstract data structures in Pascal. I think we implemented quicksort. I guess I was lucky?

Fun story: The first time I was truly speechless in CS in high school was when my teacher, looking at my code, told me that, for a boolean variable foo, it's not necessary or reasonable to write

  IF foo = TRUE THEN // whatever;  "=" is comparison in Pascal BTW

but rather you can just write

  IF foo THEN // whatever

It seems trivial, even stupid now, but at the time it was an eye-opener.

[estel]

I remember going a step further than using VBA macros in Access at least once...

Using LOGO in Primary School was far better.