There are many changes over time. In the last ten years, I especially felt changes from the educational field. Various policy changes occur constantly for new generations to cultivate new talent and lead an upcoming world. Last decade, the education community revised it’s curriculum and presented various proposals related to this, with the goal of education to fuse creative talents, a key competence in knowledge and the information society. The key point is information society.

This is the era of the fourth industrial revolution. It is a new era based on accumulated data related to IT technology that has been previously developed. A number of relevant tasks are being formed to process and handle data, and software technology (SW) is therefore important. At this point, the education process reflected this tendency and implemented related policies and led changes for about 10 years. What changes and improvements have been made? Also, has the appropriate policy been implemented? Let's examine some more facts.

In the liberal arts and natural science integrated education course, which was revised in 2015, a unit on basic education of SW was added. The very previous revision of the curriculum in 2009 included an amendment to the education for use of ICT¹, which was related to adapting to an information society and to keep up with a changing society. However, this was only a one-sided way of taking classes, using information and communication technology. It did not help students to directly deal with SW, so there was a limit in the policy to foster talent for the information society. What the educational authorities have now introduced is a new education concentrated on the basics of SW in the liberal arts and natural science integrated education course. When the curriculum was first announced, there was a craze for early coding education at academies. A new word Unsuhwaeco (un: Korean, su: Mathmatics, wae: Foreign Language, co: Coding), had been created in the form of adding coding to existing basic subjects. So, what are the contents considered under the name of SW basic education?

The goal of SW basic education is to understand the production principles of software. To enable easy and fun learning through the experience of play-oriented algorithms, programming experiences using educational tools, and to use them to create algorithms by improving computational thinking skills. The creation of algorithms refers to a series of procedures and processes for problem solving, and can be called the basic stage of programming. So in the end, all of these are basic steps before understanding the basic operating process of software and moving on to next level practice. Although I have not yet had a deep opinion, this implementation was seen as a highly desirable policy. I am particularly interested in software in computer engineering, because of the increased number of SW-related jobs under the fourth industrial revolution and the need for SW talent everywhere.

There are a few things about this policy that are not perfect yet. One of the biggest limitations initially feared, was that the curriculum was applied despite the lack of teacher training related to SW. The increased need was too much to carry out SW-related classes of actual studies (based on elementary schools) that had not been implemented before. Of course, there are a lot of SW-related jobs and the talent required, but it was the incumbent teachers who completed only a few hours of SW training to teach the students. Moreover, the classroom environment was not well organized. In an interview in 2017 on KBS News, a teacher said, “A teacher must follow the changes in student generations, so we have to constantly try to learn about new things. I believe this SW education is definitely one of them.”

Of course, these class problems will be solved if the systematically supported budget is expanded afterwards, and the SW classes will be necessary and meaningful for students if they become more active in the future. In fact, however, the most important things to work on are that classes are still only being held at a few schools selected as SW-focused schools, the need for more advanced classes, and that high schools are operating this curriculum selectively.

New policies are made in the changing society. That is, in this generation, the society needs more engineers. Many people agreed that these changes are to be especially in SW field. Before everything that compulsory education coding needed was ready, this whole thing was put into action. That brought problems in the way of applying the policy.The listed problems that I mentioned, more preparation is surely needed. I am expecting systemized contents to prevent prerequisite learning in academies, skilled teachers,and the infrastructure for SW education as soon as possible.

1 ICT Information and Communications Technologies

Choi Seoyoung  think0412@naver.com

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