Code Academy Launches in the UK

In May 2014 Codeacademy announced it would establish a UK based office to help spread its free coding classes. This is a great article that taps into some of the challenges of bringing coding into the classroom: “The Startup That’s Bringing Coding to the World’s Classrooms” (Wired, 2014)

The article outlines a familiar scenario – not enough kids know how to code and teachers are struggling to keep up. Industry is unable to find enough skilled workers and ‘new economy’ jobs are failing to materialise as a result. Industry and academics are pressuring governments to act quickly and update the curriculum to improve digital literacy before their countries are left behind.

“Part of the problem is that, before students learn to code, teachers must learn too”

Computing at School is a not-for-profit asked by the UK government to develop a computer science curriculum. In 2013 the UK Government announced it was launching 800 support groups in partnership with Computing at School to train some 20,000 teachers in the new curriculum. Simon Peyton Jones is the man leading the project. It plans to partner with Codeacademy to share its lesson plans and teaching resources.

It has been harder for Codeacademy to penetrate the USA in such scale. The curriculum is controlled by states and school districts. The first battle is to convince people that coding should be taught at all. The company, together with Code.org, has had to take a grassroots approach, using the internet and community mentors/keen teachers to reach out to keen teachers and schools. It sounds as though this is how the movement started in the UK and is a likely model for spreading the classes.

The comments section is always my favourite part of the internet. Here I’ll address a few of them:

1. There is no need for formal education because interested kids will find their own way to coding: False. I don’t believe the “my kid learnt to programme through Minecraft” argument reaches out to enough people. The world needs a substantial number of new people with this skills set and currently we are barely hitting our replacement rate. You need to expose all kids to new concepts before we will see a mass uptake of computational thinking.
2. It is hard to get coding in schools because teachers don’t know how to do it themselves: True. There are some amazing teachers out there, but most teachers did not learning this level of computing at school. No other subject has changed so radically in one generation. In Sydney I believe that there is currently only one university training pre-service teachers on computer sciences.
3. Codeacademy is not the best free teaching tool: I’m undecided and I don’t mind. Yes, there are many – Scratch, CoderDojo, CodeClub, Blockly – and I’m happy if a school is using any of them. If your child has excelled at the intro lessons and is not feeling challenged then fantastic, the first objective has been acheived – they know something about coding.
4. We shouldn’t teach coding because there are not enough jobs: False. Tough one, obviously unemployment is very real for people that are struggling to find work – and yes, this happens in the tech sector too – though I don’t know where the 70% unemployment figure comes from. A challenge with metrics in this space is that we are talking about ‘unrealised’ jobs, ones that fail to materialise because the skills sets are not there to make them happen (as opposed to offshoring). I’ll need to look into that further.

And that’s a wrap for today. Main follow up is to look into the UK based Computing at School/Codeacademy relationship.