On the Australian Technologies Curriculum

Bamn. There we have it. The Australian Technologies Curriculum has been officially approved by the Commonwealth Minister for Education. This Foundation – Year 10 curriculum contains two subjects: a) Design and Technologies and b) Digital Technologies. It’s fair to say that it is the second subject that has most piqued the tech industries’ interest due to the inclusion of coding/programming (visual programming in year 5-6 and general coding languages in years 7-8).

The Minister’s announcement also touches on the previously announced $12million STEM fund that will go to:

• the development of innovative mathematics curriculum resources ($7.4m) – “The Mathematics by Inquiry project will produce a suite of innovative, high quality mathematics teaching and learning resources” (LINK)
• supporting the introduction of computer coding across different year levels ($3.5m) -not too many details on this one – sounds like it will be an online resources collection.
• establishing a P-TECH-style school pilot site ($500,000) – an industry/govt collaboration based on the IBM/City of New York school. These will be based in Geelong and Ballarat. The program is administered by Skilling Australia Foundation (LINK)
• funding summer schools for STEM students from underrepresented groups. ($?600,000) – Previous press releases mentioned a focus on Indigenous Australia and females in technology, but not too many details since then.

My thoughts:

This is pretty big stuff. It was exactly a year ago that the curriculum review suggested that the introduction of technology subjects would crowd and complicate the Australian curriculum and that coding should be introduced as part of an elective from year 9 onwards. This time last year there was a very real chance that technology in general, and coding in particular, would be integrated as part of other subjects – or, left up to the interests of individual schools/teachers to introduce.

Given the implications of implementing an Australia wide curriculum change – the $12million STEM funding is starting to look a little out of place. At the time it looked like a consolation prize for an education system that was going to miss out on a technology focus. Now that the game has changed – this fund appears a little piece meal – four interesting, but not exactly game changing or scalable initiatives.

For a government aiming to position Australia for the 21st century – the introduction of this curriculum is a good start. The responsibility is now passed to the State Governments to look at the extent to which it will be adopted and the speed/quality of implementation.

On whether America’s obsession with STEM is dangerous

A couple of weeks ago I was sent Fareed Zakaria’s article “Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous” (March, Washington Post). The article looked like a counter to the endless commentary on the need to increase the technical skills of students. This movement is largely USA driven but also reaches Europe, Australia and a bunch of what I would generalise as ‘Western education systems’.

The gist of the article is that a hardcore drive towards technical skills (i.e. the learn to code movement), at the expense of liberal arts education, would erode the very elements that made the USA a success – creativity, innovation and problem solving. Zakaria points to the USA’s low global rankings in maths and science but, instead of seeing that as an issue, says that it has always been this way and the USA has been successful regardless.

Personally I believe this is a misguided, clickbait-y, point of view. I have never heard anyone say that liberal arts degrees, and diverse interests, are not valuable. The line is always that technology is a tool to deliver your ideas. These ideas come through big thinking, innovation, creativity etc. It’s not that coding advocates want to do away with liberal arts degrees – its more that our students are coming through the elementary school system without even a basic exposure to tools that will benefit them immensely during their lives (and careers).

The article suggests that revised curriculums have a “narrow” STEM focus. I disagree with this as well. The revised curriculum in Australia proposes a strong focus on problem solving and logical thinking. It does this in the form of computational thinking  – and backs it up by exposing students to the programming and coding skills needed to deliver this creative thinking. There is a large gap between our generations comfort with technology and our ability to make things with it. This gap between confidence and competence is what we are working to reduce – hopefully creating a generation of students that are flexible thinkers, capable of finding jobs that deliver on their passions. In the 21st century its the students with the best skills set that will have the greatest chance of making the impact they want to see.

On the learn-to-code movement in 2015

Last December, Ryan Seashore, CEO and founder of CodeNow, put up his thoughts on the learn-to-code movement – where its at and where it needs to be. I like this article for several reasons. First, it attempts to put a time line around the host of initiatives – making it very clear how recent most of them are. Second, it adds structure to the movement and distinguishes between the different players.

Here’s how Seashore broke them down:

Awareness: the purpose of these orgs is to raise awareness of the need for increased computer science/coding education. The main player here is Code.org, with Made with Code also referenced. Success is measured in terms of publicity, social media and uptake of campaigns such as Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week. [JW note: I’m pretty sure Code.org would argue that, through their teacher support materials, they moving well down the chain into the exposure and immersion categories, but in general, they play an important role in raising awareness of this issue]

Exposure: main goal of these orgs is to give students a taste of coding as a discipline. The idea is to give students exposure so they can then decide if its an area of interest they might want to pursue in college. Players: CodeNow, Black Girls Code, CoderDojo, Technovation, Rails Girls etc. Success is measured by the number and diversity of students that attend the programs.

Immersion: a subset of the exposure groups – here the aim is to bridge the gap between the first 5-30 hours and full blown curriculum. Programs include SMASH, Girls Who Code, TEALS, ScriptED, UrbanTXT. Once again, success is measured by number and diversity of attendees.

Vocational: generally for-profit. Think General Assembly, Dev Bootcamp, Hack Bright Academy etc. These guys have grown fast and can offer specialisations like UI design, front end coding, app creation, data science etc.

Online: these are online courses, often free, from CodeAcademy, Khan Academy, CodeSchool and MOOCs facilitated through Coursera and Udacity. These can range from hour long tutorials through to 8-12 week courses. Here Seashore comments on the frequently quoted 5% completion rate and the huge amount of self-discipline needed to actually finish the courses.

The ‘where to from here’ section of Seashore’s article touched on a few things: a) the creation of a national association to coordinate the linkages between all the above organisations – to help them move up the education ladder, b) setting public goals for education, c) pushing the public to challenge the government to make coding mandatory in schools, and d) pushing tech companies to do more than just donate money – they can play an active role in educating students and taking interns.

My thoughts:

• Not-for-profits: Seashore starts his article saying that not-for-profits are stepping into this space because the tech industry has diversity issues and sectors of society (women, African American, Hispanic) are not being included in this incredibly progressive, well paying industry sector. This is true for Australia as well – the tech sector has low representation from women, Indigenous Australians and other groups. However our base uptake is so low that, in general, Australians as a whole are missing out on this opportunity. Not-for-profits are stepping in, not for diversity reasons, but because they can move faster (and arguably have less responsibility) than official government education. Very few of the organisations above have a physical presence in Australia – which relegates them all to the ‘self driven’ online category.
• Educational progression: Seashore’s article warns of offering false hopes. Imagine for example that enthusiastic volunteers (from organisations or companies) come into a school, run an amazing workshop on coding, generate a healthy amount of interest in technology but then leave an under supported teacher to figure out the next steps. It would make sense for each outreach activity to have a ‘next steps’ component to their activities.
• Localisation: in Australia we are starting to see a few organisations emerge in for-profit category of tech education – General Assembly, CoderFactory and Code Rangers (relatively new) are some that come to mind. Code Rangers is interesting because it is playing in the traditionally not-for-profit space of youth education but is tapping the structured, and paid, after school networks. Essentially providing a quality alternative to after school care for young students.

On Malcolm Turnbull and Tech Education

Last month, the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for Communications and hero of the tech world, spoke at what looks like a Westpac associated event. The topic: “The Importance of Tech Education in Our Schools” (24 October, 2014).

In most regards the speech was on-point. It addressed:

• The Digital Technologies curriculum review – stating that the review’s intent was to simplify Australia’s curriculum and that coding could emerge through another strand, such as mathematics. This incorporation of coding into the mathematics curriculum was mentioned three times in the speech. Turnbull also mentioned the need to distinguish between the recommendations of Phil Callil, the subject matter expert, and the review as a whole. This was to remind people that Callil determined that key ICT skills taught as part of the digital technologies syllabus, such as coding and computational thinking, should be taught from Foundation to Year 10.
• The role of technology in changing our economy – the need to create new jobs as old jobs disappear and the need for Australia to remain internationally competitive. Particularly if Australia wishes to remain a high cost centre with a strong social support network. He referenced Dr Ian Chubb’s recognition that about half of all US economic growth in the last 50 years came from scientific and technological advances.
• The difference between passively consuming technology and actively making it – quote:

“…Instead of teaching students how to be passive consumers of technology…, our educators should be teaching students how to create, how to code.”

• ICT education participation rates – commencements in tertiary ICT courses have also fallen sharply, with a 53 per cent decline between 2001 and 2011, while completions declined by 58 per cent over the same period. And that while female participation in the workforce is almost 50%, female participation in STEM careers sits at 25%.

Mr Turnbull said that we need to ensure that:

• We are equipping students with the skills for employment in an increasingly competitive globalised economy
• We are improving the pathways for students to study IT from Foundation through to secondary school and onto university
• There is an increase in the percentage of school-aged girls participating in ICT and women employed in the ICT sector
• Teachers are supported to undertake professional learning in key areas of IT competency.

The speech referenced two ideas:

• First, the $500,000 set aside for the Geelong based P-Tech. Modelled on IBM’s work in the US – this P-Tech would increase industry engagement in the school system
• Second, we closely monitor the impact of the UK introducing a Digital Technologies curriculum.

My thoughts:

Most of the speech’s content is exactly what people are looking for. Recognition that technology will play an increasingly important role in our future, that jobs are changing and the economy needs to change with it. One thing that stood out was the constant referencing of mathematics as the solution to embedding logic and computational thinking in the K-6 curriculum. Not sure if everyone will agree that’s the solution… but if it is going to live anywhere under the current structure that’s not a terrible place. It was interesting to see Turnbull specifically name-check the Canberra based Australian Mathematics Trust (see quote below).

The speech was a little light on solutions. The current initiatives put forward by the Commonwealth Government include: a) review the curriculum, b) $3.5 million to embed ‘coding across the curriculum’ and c) the P-Tech. It’s tough to see how these initiatives will have the desired effect – especially given the emphasis put on the incredible pace that technology is influencing the world.

Full quote on Australian Mathematics Trust:

Teaching students how to code – to use computers to create rather than just consume – from Foundation through to Year 8 could be appropriately incorporated into the mathematics syllabus, for example.

A leader in this area is the Australian Mathematics Trust based in Canberra. I commend you to the work they are doing in informatics, a mathematics discipline, where students learn the basic algorithms, data structures and computational techniques that underlie information and communication, and demonstrate their learning through computer programming tasks.

On the Australian Government’s $3.5m coding in schools announcement

The Australian Government’s curriculum review recently suggested that technologies subjects were best placed as an elective for students in Year 9 and above. A day later the same government announced a $12 million fund to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects in primary and secondary schools. Of particular note is the second item – a specific $3.5m allocation to introduce coding across different year levels in Australian schools.

The $12 million is broken down like this:

• $7.4m to develop and implement Mathematics by inquiry
• $3.5m towards introduction to computer coding across the curriculum
• $0.5m towards establishing a P-TECH styled education facility
• $0.6m to extend national science and mathematics summer schools to include more girls, disadvantaged and Indigenous school students, including those from regional and remote areas.

This funding is a subset of a larger $400m project called the the Industry, Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda (the Agenda). Under this Agenda, the Government has four key ambitions, including:

1. a lower cost, business friendly environment with less regulation, lower taxes and more competitive markets;
2. a more skilled labour force;
3. better economic infrastructure; and
4. industry policy that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship.

The $3.5m coding in schools funding description currently reads:

Building on these maths education programmes, the Government will provide a further $3.5 million to encourage the introduction of computer coding across different year levels in Australian schools. ‘Coding across the curriculum’ will contribute to addressing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry feedback which consistently emphasises a looming acute shortage of computer programming skills. It is anticipated that a consortia of organisations with appropriate professional capacity and technical expertise will be contracted through tender processes to deliver these programmes.

My thoughts:

Need more information. The $12m funding announcement came a day after the Government released its review effectively suggesting that specific tech subjects are mainly relevant for students Years 9 and above. The review also suggested that computer science learning objectives were best delivered when folded into other subjects. This announcement of a specific fund for coding ‘across different year levels’ doesn’t align with the curriculum announcement. Another thing I’m not clear on is the duration – $3.5m per annum is very different to $3.5 over four years.

Coding in schools is currently a niche interest – mainly existing as weekend, lunchtime or after school programs outside the school structure. This helps retain their independence and keeps the administration lean. Organisations like Code Club have just started expanding – these organisations are powered by international resources, enthusiastic local volunteers/teachers and, where available, private sector funding. CoderDojo operates in the same area but has more of an industry mentorship/weekend activity approach.

I’m keen to know if the allocated funding is intended to scale existing extra curricular activities or whether it is intended for something embedded in the school structure.

On the Australian Government’s Review of the Digital Technologies Curriculum

The Australian Government recently announced its review of the Australian Curriculum. Suffice to say the technology community was not impressed. The review suggested that the proposed Technologies curriculum was best suited as an elective for students in years 9 and above. This goes against the very things that made the original draft attractive – that it was compulsory from Foundation to Year 10 and that it separated out the ‘using’ of technology from the ‘making’ of technology.

The review had a number of recommendations:

• The Technologies learning area should be introduced from Year 9 – not Foundation- Year 10 as previously suggested
• The two Technologies strands of Design and Technology (“using tech”) and Digital Technologies (“making things with tech/computational thinking”) should be merged – which is not dissimilar to the current structure and avoids a direct focus on programming/coding
• The terminology of the curriculum needs consistency and terms/achievement levels need clear definition – never a bad idea

Additional recommendations from the subject expert include:

• Integrate design and technologies into other subjects in primary years and then commence the specific subjects in lower secondary classes (year 9)
• IF design and technologies is taught in F-8 then teachers would need serious support and professional development
• That additional training is provided for secondary school teachers to support the curriculum

The reasons given in the review are as follows:

• There is no international consensus on what a technologies curriculum should include. Apart from the US and UK, few other countries are making technology a compulsory subject and the review outlines the confusing way that technology has been integrated into global curriculums (as part of science, a VET subject, a coding subject etc)
• The primary school curriculum is overcrowded and removing Technologies frees up time to teach other subjects – avoiding the ‘inch deep and a mile wide’ scenario
• Concern over the structure of the subject – that the separation of ‘technologies’ (designed to emphasise ‘making’) from the ‘general ICT capability’ (designed to emphasise ‘using’) was confusing
• The need for teacher professional development in order to pull this off – that teachers were not accustomed to the complex language proposed in the Technologies curriculum and would need support

The subject specialist reviewing the curriculum raised a number of concerns:

• There was little involvement from primary teachers in designing the Digital Technologies curriculum
• The name of the ‘digital technologies’ was not suitable and was not recognised by industry
• Language used in the curriculum achievement standards for Years F-8  is beyond many teachers without a specialist background.
• The writing of the curriculum is pitched at too high a level for primary and secondary teachers.
• The reviewer also questioned whether “Technologies”, as a subject, is the natural home for the technology subject matter OR should it be pervasive across all subjects?

My thoughts:
The above recommendations seem to undermine the purpose of a national Technologies curriculum. The intent of the curriculum update was the ensure that Australian students were gaining contemporary skills that would put both the students and the country in a good position in the next 15-20 years. It is natural that this is a difficult task with few global case studies – that’s what happens if you want to stay at the forefront of education. It is also natural that teachers should have support to implement these changes. I would argue that teachers need support even without these changes as currently 60% of teachers handling Years 7-10 and 48% of Year 11-12 have no formal ICT qualification.

I’m not sure about the idea of integrating Technology across other strands. I imagine this means that during an art class, students would use some form of digital media, or maybe they are asked to create an iBook for a history presentation. I have a feeling this will lead to a situation where teachers (naturally) support concepts they are already familiar with – what teacher, off their own bat, would use robotics as a method of teaching geometry when you can use more established traditional methods?

In saying this – arguably nothing has changed. The national curriculum has been sitting in draft format for almost a year and was reliant on State Government to support to roll out at a local level. The report mentions that one jurisdiction already had a good existing course and had no plans to replace its current content.

The report can be found here: Review of the Australian Curriculum, Final Report (October, 2014) – the Technologies section begins on page 208

On the UK’s Digital Curriculum

Are teachers ready for the coding revolution? (BBC News, January 2014) is an article about the changes to the English digital technologies curriculum. However the article is not the most interesting part of this post – as always – the money is in the comments section. I did a quick read of about 100 of the comments (of 240) and have pulled together a summary below. For the most part the comments were negative, criticising the UK government’s ability to roll out an education program, questioning its necessity, questioning teachers capability in delivering the curriculum, debating England’s role in the global technology value chain…

Here’s the summary:

On teachers:

The comments focused on teachers not having the skills or confidence to deliver programming in the classroom. Some thought that a poorly taught subject would do more harm than good – further discouraging people from pursuing technology as a career path or skills set. They suggested that teachers are already overworked and don’t have time to master a new set of tools (such as Scratch). The point was raised that students would rapidly overtake their teachers and the teachers would be left struggling without support.

On programming as part of the curriculum:

These comments asked why should programming be taught in primary school – they suggested primary school was for reading, writing, science, sports, socialisation. Teaching programming would create a generation of anti-social nerds. They suggested that there is a myth that a) programming is necessary to be in the tech space and b) coding is being oversold as an economic solution – that in reality it is a boring, frustrating, tedious process. Others argued that teaching coding languages was pointless however there was some benefit to teaching computational thinking and logic. Another point said that what really needs to be taught is entrepreneurship and business skills – then the students would learn to apply their tech knowledge through doing. And the ever present – why do I need to learn to code if I am not planning on working in technology?

On the economy:

There was a lot of discussion about whether anyone actually needs coding skills in 21st century England. That this is a skills set that should be outsourced to cheaper locations in the world (specifically mentioning India and Eastern Europe). Some commented that there were already enough skilled workers in England but that employers were looking for cheap labour overseas so talent was left languishing in unemployment queues. Others said that salaries were too low to attract high quality students into those careers. Another comment was that you don’t actually spend time coding if you are working in tech.

On the Government’s plans:

High levels of cynicism that the program would be over promised and under delivered, leaving teachers high and dry without resources.

My thoughts:

Tough crowd. However the comments do raise interesting points for any government looking to tackle technology in the curriculum. The biggest question I saw was about whether every student needs to learn to code? The typical answer is ‘not really’ – not everyone is going to head into the tech space. A more nuanced answer is ‘yes’, because students need to be exposed to this line of thinking – alongside the traditional maths, writing, science – so that they are not locked out of future job prospects. A key difference between the the 1980s (the last time governments had a tech push) and now is the omni presence of technology in our lives. Technology is no longer a nerd thing, everyone is using a smartphone and doing business/life over the internet. You don’t have to have a career in this space but you do need to know how it works.

The question of employability has been raised before. How can we say we are experiencing a STEM crisis if there is currently a skilled pool of programmers unable to find jobs (be it the US, Australia or the UK). At the moment the only answer I have found is that this relates to whether these candidates have continued to develop their skills/certificates and also do they have the soft skills and diverse backgrounds needed for the roles – but this needs more research and insight.

Either way, the above comments give an indication of the types of questions a government would need to address before rolling out a program of this nature.

On Telstra Foundation’s support for Code Club Australia

The Telstra Foundation recently announced its financial support ($532,000) for Code Club Australia. This is part of the Foundation’s larger $2.4million package it has allocated to a number of technology/digital lifestyle initiatives including anti-cyber bullying, disability inclusiveness, online mental health and its flagship partnerships with the Indigenous Digital Excellence (IDX) team and the eSmart Libraries project. All up the Foundation has now invested some $18million in digital lifestyle initiatives.

From the press release:

(This funding will be used) to help achieve the Code Club Australia’s mission to give every child in the country the chance to learn code through an accelerated “train the trainer” program targeting 500 teachers and prioritising schools in low socio-economic areas. While teaching kids to code now may help solve a future skills shortage, coding also builds kids problem-solving abilities, digital confidence and helps kids understand the world around them.

My thoughts:
Nice work Telstra! The global trend we’re seeing is that the tech sector, and particularly student education, is moving faster than government education providers. State (and national) level curriculums take years to compile, process and distribute – students need this type of education now. The private sector, together with programs like CodeClub, Code.org, CodeAcademy and CoderDojo, is helping fill this space while governments work out if, how and when to incorporate this content into a formalised curriculum.

It’s interesting to note that both Code Club and Coder Dojo generally operate outside school hours. For the most part they are seen as extra curricular activities. This is probably the most effective place for these programs to start as it means they can operate with more independence than if they were operating inside class time. It also means that the students that do attend are the ones that elect to be there. This addresses concerns that these programs are pushing a computer science agenda onto students that may not be interested. If you’re looking for a simple differentiator (correct me if I’m wrong) – in Australia, Code Clubs act as after school programs run by teachers while Coder Dojos tend to run out of community centres (libraries) by volunteers (on weekends or whenever is convenient).

Where is this headed: In the USA, Code.org also started out as an extra curricular activity and is now making a heavy push to develop teaching materials and embed itself into the actual school agenda. Code.org recently announced its Code Studio that provides lesson plans and teacher support dashboards for classrooms across the full K-12 spectrum.

A final comment – I was recently talking with a teacher about the impact these programs are having at their school. They raised the point that while these programs are great (well resourced, free, scalable) – they also don’t appeal to every learning style. Online, computer based learning has a heavy preference to Visual learners. This teacher wanted to balance their program to include elements attractive to Auditory and Kinesthetic learners as well. This is where the programming learned through Code Club can tie in nicely to things like RoboCup Jnr and FiRST Lego League (all founded on Scratch, MIT’s visual programming language).

If you’re after more info – here’s a more detailed video with Peter Argent (starts around 4m20s, length: 00:28”17’)

On the BBC’s Make It Digital campaign (2015)

The BBC has announced its “Make It Digital” campaign – including a series of TV programs supported by online content to educate young people on coding. The campaign coincides with the new computing curriculum’s introduction in England.

The broadcaster is also moving into programming-themed children’s TV shows for autumn 2015 (nb. Australian September-December 2015). Jessica Cecil is the organiser of the BBC’s coding and digital creative initiative – here’s a great blog post Jessica wrote outlining the BBC’s plans.

The TV programs:

The new materials on Bitesize (a BBC education website) cover 40 different elements tailored to the new curriculum, ranging from primary school level up to GCSE exams. Topics for younger pupils include debugging programs, writing animation code and explaining how the internet works. Coverage for older children includes algorithms, data representation and binary.

Tech-themed TV shows that will be broadcast later in the year include:

• Technobabble – an app and gadget-themed show made by the team behind Newsround, designed to encourage its audience to expand its computer skills
• Appsolute Genius – a spin-off of the existing CBBC show Absolute Genius – in which the hosts, Dick and Dom, interview prominent computer programmers, including the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man. The show will also run a competition in which one child’s idea for a video game will be picked and development of the title will be tracked over a 12-week period before it is released for free to PCs and mobile phones
• Nina and the Neurons: Go Digital – five episodes of the CBeebies show that will explore 3D printing, coding and driverless cars

Interesting – this is the BBC’s second recent attempt to get this off the ground – the other venture, BBC Jam, had to be scrapped in 2007 after complaints from the commercial sector that it posed unfair competition to education-themed businesses. The project had been intended to support the government’s computer-based “digital curriculum” of the time. The BBC was also involved in a similar initiative in the 1980s to support computer education/uptake.

My thoughts:

This is fairly awesome and picks up on a lot of trends. It normalises the tech space by including it in mass media. It delivers both online and TV based content (expensive and difficult to achieve). It is consortia based, tapping into the best of the tech educators already addressing these issues. It aligns and supports the government’s curriculum rollout (which makes sense). I’m impressed by their ability to make historical dramas about technology (first female programmers, inventors of the internet etc). I can’t wait to see it roll out.

(source article: BBC begins kids coding push with Bitesize and TV shows by Leo Kelion, 1 Sept 2014)