Rhiannon Williams

Pushing the right buttons

The changes being introduced in teaching computer science are long overdue, says  <em>Rhiannon Williams</em>

My first memory of a computer is of a hulking Acorn PC that dominated a corner of my primary school classroom. I remember crafting a story about ghosts on the beige keyboard before saving it to a floppy disk, which was filed away by the teacher for safekeeping. That was in 1995, and washing machines now easily outpower that Acorn. Yet it’s not only the gadgets in our schools and colleges that have advanced as tablets, interactive whiteboards and internal mail systems make relics of blackboards and personal planners. From September, Information and Communications Technology classes (ICT) will be replaced with Computing as part of an initiative to teach children how to create their own programs, instead of just learning to use other people’s.

Teaching pupils from the age of five to write simple algorithms and helping older pupils to learn programming languages is part of what Michael Gove, in October 2012, claimed was what Britain needs in order to ‘produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee — creator of the internet’. The former secretary of state for education may have been left red-faced (Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, not the internet) but the dramatic amendments to the curriculum have been hailed by many as essential to turning around the country’s technological fortunes.

In a speech in 2011, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt criticised the British education system’s lack of focus on computer science, saying we were throwing away our ‘great computing heritage’. We may have invented photography, TV and computers, but Britons fail to dominate in those fields of technology now. What’s needed is to reignite children’s passion for science, maths and engineering.

I recently attended a Bermotech summer camp, where children and teenagers between nine and 15 were learning how to develop their own iPhone apps, and was struck by how quickly these bright young things picked up commands.

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