I had an identical experience, me being bored with screwing around with MS Office nearly caused me to fail GCSE IT, I was so bored by the time the database module came around that I submitted a mySQL backed eCommerce site as my final project.

I don't know how much things have changed in the 10 years I've been out of education, but back then you had to take learning into your own hands to get a glimpse of any real computing.