Computer Code

Page 1 51 of 67 DOCUMENTS The Sunday Times (London) March 4, 2012 Sunday Edition 1; National Edition The ancient language our kids lack: computer code BYLINE: ELEANOR MILLS SECTION: NEWS REVIEW;FEATURES; OPINION, COLUMN; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 1079 words The buff cardboard box was put on the table with a flourish. Out of it came a green circuit board covered in weird black boxes and bits of copper wire. "It's a computer," said my mum. I remember looking at her blankly as she explained that we could tell it what to do. An hour or so later, having fiddled around entering "0"s and "1"s into a keypad, following the interminable instructions, we finally saw the red display light up. "Hello," it said. The reward-to-effort ratio was singularly underwhelming. But 30 years later I still remember it and also the simple programming we did on a cream-coloured box called a BBC Micro at school. The result was a rudimentary understanding of the building blocks of a computer's brain. Although such technology now underpins all aspects of our lives, children aren't allowed to mess around with code. At some point schools became worried that kids would break computers by reprogramming them, so they stopped teaching them about code. Instead they learn how to use software, such as Word and Excel. "It's like teaching them to read but not how to write," says Ian Livingstone, author of a report on education and technology called Next Gen (and a co-founder of the company that launched the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons in Britain). Fortunately, that may all be about to change. Last week a £22, credit-card-sized computer, the Raspberry Pi, was released, aimed at schools and children. The intention is to create a new generation of computer programmers. It has taken six years to design and is the brainchild of a Cambridge charity. Eben Upton, its co-founder, got the idea because he was horrified by how little students - even those applying to study computer science at university - knew about "what a computer really was or how it worked". He teamed up with David Braben, a video-game stalwart who also wanted to find a way to get young people programming, and they decided to create a modern version of an "exciting, programmable machine like the old BBC Micro or Sinclair Spectrum in the 1980s, which created a horde of home programmers". It is paradoxical that as computers have become an omnipresent part of modern life, their inner workings have become more and more opaque. Just as cars have become so technologically complicated that there is no point in trying to fiddle under the bonnet to check what has gone wrong, so many of the latest computers, such as the iPad, don't even allow the user to open them up, let alone ever see a line of code. The result is that while children are increasingly computer-literate - I saw a two-year-old last weekend competently playing a shoot-'em-up game on a smartphone - they have less idea of how a computer works, or how to program it, than we did 30 years ago. There is also a widespread lack of awareness of what skills and subjects are required to pursue a career in Page 2 computer science, which is unfortunate given that it is a key area for the new digital economy and one in which Britain has rather a good track record. We are a hub for the development of computer games - the phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto series started off here, to name but one. Computer gaming is predicted to be worth £55 billion a year worldwide by 2014 and is one of the largest entertainment industries. What's more, all the computer-generated special effects in the Narnia and Harry Potter movies were created here. Yet Britain is already falling behind in this area; we are being overtaken by countries such as Finland, Israel and Singapore. These are countries where computer science is part of the national curriculum. Livingstone highlighted this "worrying educational blind spot" in his report. He reckons we should put computer science centre stage in our schools - that it should be part of Michael Gove's English baccalaureate. "Kids love it," Livingstone says. "It teaches them maths, physics, logic. Britain is the most creative country in the world; we need to give our kids the coding skills to create the next Twitter or Google." Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, makes clear that Jobs's particular genius lay in being that rare creature, someone who understood technology but also art; his dual sensibility allowed him to see how computers could aid creativity. Yet all too often schools divide pupils into the scientific and the artistic rather than encouraging a fusion of the two. To be successful in the modern world requires both sets of skills. If you are creating computer graphics for a film such as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it is all very well to understand how water moves but when it comes to creating a special effect to mimic it, you have to combine scientific knowledge with an artistic sensibility. The divisions in our education system discourage such a synthesis. That must change. Last week I attended a session hosted by Google designed to encourage more women to become programmers (only about 10% are female). "Becoming enthralled by the magic world of computers and of manipulating them needs to start young," Alma Whitten, 45, the firm's head of privacy, explained. She described how she'd first encountered a computer aged seven when a family friend took her to see a mainframe and let her play a game. "I was a bookish child who wanted to go into the theatre, but I'd always remembered the magic of that first computer encounter," she said. "I became a programmer as I thought it would be a better moneyspinner than waiting tables while I got into drama." She believes more women must follow her "if we are going to create the kind of technology that half the world wants to use". Computing doesn't have to be boy territory. Intriguingly, in Africa, Google has been handing out laptops to children. When they break, they go to the "computer hospital". In many African communities, healing is traditionally a female occupation - so, with impeccable logic, the computer healers are all female. Girls, Whitten says, need to be encouraged "to do that boy stuff - take apart alarm clocks and put them back together, and particularly to play visuospatial computer games. They need to do that stuff, not sit on Facebook." It is not just girls who need to be encouraged. Computer science needs to become as mainstream as literacy and maths. It is much too important to all of our economic futures to remain the nerdy preserve of teenage boys with specs and spots. So, kids, get coding! [email protected] LOAD-DATE: March 4, 2012 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH Page 3 GRAPHIC: Pupils at a school in Chester try out the new Raspberry Pi micro-computer held by the girl on the far right CHRISTOPHER THOMOND PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper JOURNAL-CODE: STS Copyright 2012 Times Newspapers Limited All Rights Reserved Page 1 The Times Educational Supplement March 9, 2012 A basic approach to programming BYLINE: William Stewart SECTION: PEDAGOGY; Pg. 4 No. 0024 LENGTH: 2491 words Teachers have new freedom to teach computing - and they will discover that coding is not just for ICT ex- perts. In an era when ministers like to state exactly what method schools should use to teach reading and seek to define the "essential" subject knowledge every pupil must be taught, Michael Gove has done a very rare thing. The education secretary announced this term that he would rip up the rules for an entire subject, leaving teachers free to decide what to teach in it and how to teach it. And this was no fringe subject, but information and communications technology, a key part of the curriculum and compulsory throughout primary and secondary school. From September, Gove's plan is that ICT will not be in the national curriculum at all. But, he said, it "will remain compulsory at all key stages, and will still be taught at every stage of the curriculum". And it will be up to teachers to decide how it is taught. "Technology in schools will no longer be micromanaged by Whitehall," the secretary of state said. "All schools will be free to use the amazing resources that already exist on the web." Sudden and unexpected freedom can be bewildering and frightening, particularly if you have no idea of the rationale behind it. So before looking at some of what is available on the internet, it is worth briefly examining why the change has taken place. The background It is a move ministers have been under enormous pressure to make, from a growing lobby that has been ar- guing that the ICT curriculum has been putting England at a competitive disadvantage. Our pupils have been wasting hours learning to use office applications that as digital natives they would have picked up anyway, the argument goes. Meanwhile, the programming or coding skills that helped make Britain an early leader in computer games - now a multibillion-pound industry bigger than Hollywood - are being ne- glected. Ian Livingstone, the games publisher, co-authored a report last year that warned that the UK had gone backwards because its "schools turned away from programming in favour of ICT".

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