Where will the next generation of programmers come from? Tony Parkin attends the Educating Programmers Summit for some brainstorming and optimism
“Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage." As Google's Eric Schmidt berated the assembled UK media about our failure to excite or even engage current learners with computing, welcoming cheers went up from a group of educators who had spent the previous day discussing this critical issue.
Jason Gorman, patron of the Bletchley Park Trust and managing director of Codemanship, had assembled an eclectic group to discuss how to put the UK education system back on the right computing track.
Schmidt made his comments in his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival (full text here) to an audience full of journalists and TV glitterati which guaranteed wide media coverage at the weekend. At Bletchley Park, home of some of the greatest ever computational thinking in the UK, a mix of software developers, teachers and representatives of industry names like Microsoft, Google and the BBC were attending the ‘Educating Programmers Summit’ where they also debated this very issue.
Jason Gorman opened the summit with a similarly hard-hitting review of the current situation. The UK experiences an annual growth in demand for 10,000 programmers. Coincidentally, 10,000 is the number of the entire cohort of teachers that qualify annually. Yet, depressingly, last year only three of these teachers were computing graduates with the requisite skills to enthuse, support and develop the next generation of programmers.
This challenge is not confined to the UK; it is happening all over the Western developed world and is largely being systematically ignored. This is in sharp contrast to the position of countries like India where well-developed government strategies boost computing education.
Students applying for university computing more than 50% down – fewer women
Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research in Cambridge also had sobering news to share. There has been a fall of more than 50 per cent in the numbers of UK students applying to study computing at university. More dismal was the news on gender balance, with even fewer women considering computing as a career.
He observed that while there are now no key stage 4 qualifications in 'computing', there are at least 14 competing qualifications in the less-demanding area of 'ICT' thanks to the emphasis of the current curriculum. Outlining the work to date of the Computing at School Group (CAS), he said the focus so far had been on defining what the subject is, rather than how the subject should be taught, so there was still a great deal to be done.
"When CAS started I kept thinking I would have to make the case for change, but it seems to be an open door," he said. "Everyone now agrees that there is a need for change." CAS is greatly encouraged that so many other voices are sending out similar messages, with the Livingstone Hope NextGen Report earlier this year highlighting many of the same issues, and the OCR examination board currently in the process of developing a new GCSE Computing qualification.
Next up was Ade Oshineye, a developer advocate at Google, who pointed out that Google is a company dominated by people focused on programming and computational skills, in contrast to many organisations where these are merely seen as servicing the main business. He argued that rather than computational skills being perceived as restricted to the gifted and talented, as at present, in the coming world everyone should have the ability to program, and to understand computational thinking.
Programmers should not be considered as just be a form of ‘human compiler’ who enacted other peoples’ ideas and wishes, he said. We no longer have scribes whose job it is to write for others, so for how long will we need specialists to do all the programming for others? As the author of Apprenticeship Patterns (O’Reilly) Ade’s other main theme was that programming is a craft, not merely a skill, and that we need to appreciate the aesthetics of software craftsmanship, not merely the functionality of software engineering. Apprenticeships should not merely be about teaching skills, but also about helping and supporting people to teach themselves and develop the appreciation of the aesthetic as well as the utility of the functional.
Tools like 'Scratch' and 'Kodu' making a difference for some primary children
Teacher Ian Addison, with his overview of computing in primary schools, introduced a welcome upbeat note as he showed some of the best things happening in primary education to enthuse budding programmers. With programming tools like Scratch and Kodu being harnessed by some of our gifted primary teachers, youngsters fortunate enough to be in their classrooms were able to engage with and become excited by wonderful opportunities to program. Alongside Ian Addison at the event were a number of educators well-known on Twitter, including Miles Berry (@mberry, representing Naace), Simon Widdowson (@xannov), Drew Buddy (@digitalmaverick) and Chris Leach (@chrisleach78).
During the day’s discussions it was generally acknowledged that, sadly, not enough primary children were given the opportunities offered by the likes of Ian Addison, and that even fewer secondary children would be enthused by the computing they encountered in the classroom. A crowded secondary curriculum and limitations of the key stage 4 ICT curriculum were largely held to be responsible. Some felt that the most exciting opportunities probably came outside the formal classroom, and that many of the best software developers were self-motivated, self-taught and more influenced by the thinking of their peers than their teachers. However, developments such as Apps for Good – an organisation that supports schools and students in creating 'apps' for Android mobile devices – were also seen as inspiring a new generation of software developers in the schools that are involved.
Chris Murray, managing director of epiGenesys, offered an exciting higher education model of a student-run, university-owned programming company, based within the University of Sheffield, which combines student work experience with input and guidance from a small number of staff who are recruited from successful graduates. Fighting the image that higher education courses were out of touch and irrelevant to the needs of the IT industry, this company is practitioner-led and uses only current practices and technologies. Though high in values and extremely successful, the model struggles through lack of funding and limitations in the numbers of students that can be engaged. Unfortunately few other higher education establishments or political strategists have perceived the value of this approach, much less engaged with it.
In his MacTaggart Lecture, Eric Schmidt cited the "fabulous initiative" in the early 1980s when the BBC not only broadcast programmes about computing, and showed people how to program, but also helped provide the momentum for more than a million BBC computers to be sold into schools and homes. At Bletchley Park the group had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of Computing and see a room full of these BBC micros still in action, including three working Domesday machines, inspiring today’s schoolchildren, as well as making their parents nostalgic and aware of their own good fortune.
Raspberry Pi poised to boost programming in classrooms?
And in a timely modern echo they also heard from Eben Upton and saw an 'alpha-board' of his Raspberry Pi, the $25 computer with an ARM chip running Linux that Eben hopes will do for today’s children what the BBC Micro did for their parents (see video demo of Raspberry Pi running Quake 3 below). Eben pointed out that a key difference between today’s educational computers and the earlier BBC Micro is that children are generally no longer permitted to hack around, program and otherwise change the device.
Raspberry Pi aims to put the power back into the hands of today’s pupils by providing an affordable computer that they will be able to program and experiment with, rather than merely operate. Admitting that Raspberry Pi would love to stick a BBC logo on the device and stage the 1980s revolution all over again, Eben is confident that there is a huge market for such a device and approach. And worldwide enquiries seem to be supporting that optimism.
While much play was made earlier this year of a $25 USB-stick size Raspberry Pi, Eben feels that there is likely to be more demand for the credit-card size $35 variant which has room for more input/output connectors, including feeds to both analogue and digital television, an audio jack and even an Ethernet socket for network connection. Current estimates are that these devices will be on sale by November, 2011.
YouTube video demonstration of Raspberry Pi running 'Quake 3'
Steve Dickson, of the BBC Academy and Katie Partridge of ThoughtWorks also led some highly engaging discussions on professional development, outlining what employers are seeking from the new generation of software developers.
It is clear that there is a growing awareness that computing as a subject and software development are not currently being well served by education, but all at "Educating Programmers" were cheered by the number of moves already under way to try and address this. In summing up, Jason Gorman urged all to sign up to the Computing at Schools Group to stay up to date with the news about the various positive initiatives currently under way, and to redouble efforts to get the UK back at the forefront of educational computing.
More information
“Educating Programmers – where will the next generation of programmers come from?” was sponsored by Codemanship, the BBC Academy and ThoughtWorks.
Videos of the main presentations are available on YouTube
The Computing at Schools Working Group
And their Curriculum for Computing
Next Gen. Report: The Livingstone- Hope Skills Review of VideoGames and Special Effects
Raspberry Pi
Apps for Good
Jason Gorman on programming
Tony Parkin, former head of ICT development at the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and now an independent consultant, describes himself as a 'disruptive nostalgist'. He can be contacted at a.c.parkin@gmail.com or on Twitter via @tonyparkin
Photos courtesy of Jason Gorman
