Australian States stutter in coding-for-kids bandwagon-jump

I think you will find that New South Wales is the most populous state (5th paragraph) and Victoria referred to the next largest later on, largest is a little ambiguous or am I being to pendantic?

But regarding National Curriculum, the federal government needs to tie direct funding to the adoption to any curriculum they actually want to see get up.

"retraining more than 300 teachers as maths and science specialists"

So once again, as almost everywhere we have pseudo-education: folks just off crash courses passing on what they think they remember to those who cannot judge. But I forgot - Teaching is the real skill, subjects are just bags of facts. I obviously wasted decades studying systems engineering.

As a matter of fact I may have, given the culture. I have taught in various regions here in Blighty, and on every occasion bar one I have been handed a "Tutor Pack" containing everything necessary for the course - including crib sheets of acceptable answers to all the test questions. Almost anyone could "deliver' a course from that, without any subject matter expertise. Indeed one of my students complemented me on my ability to answer his questions, stating that my predecessor always reached for and thumbed through the text book when asked anything.

So our problem is not the quality or content of this or that syllabus - they are merely symptoms of shatteringly low expectations of both students and teachers. While we continue to impart very little, very little will result. This may explain to some extent the already abysmal and declining quality of engineering products - particularly in the software driven space. As long ago as the 1920s Owen Barfield coined the term "dashboard knowledge" for the capacity to do things by manipulating knobs and levers without any understanding of how they work, and this is what is primarily being "taught" - "How-tos" rather than the understanding of principles. This directly contributed to the Chernobyl nuclear incident, and is clearly implicated in a huge and proliferating number of broken systems from office software that needs monthly repairs to hackable "internet things" and military drones that think they've landed when they're still in the air.