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)

On university and industry perceptions of Australia’s ICT industry

Report: “Addressing ICT curriculum recommendations from surveys of academics, workplace graduates and employers” (University of Wollongong et al, 2012) [LINK]

Today I’m going to look the first (of five) issues raised in this report: perception (pages 26-43). These insights come from a survey conducted with 18 notable universities and up to 182 industry professionals (with large representation from Australian Computing Society membership). The survey looks at ICT industry perceptions from two target groups: a) universities looking to increase student enrolments, and b) industry looking to increase quantity and quality of employees.

[Extract] …poor perceptions of the ICT industry and profession are having a severe impact on the quality and quantity of people being attracted to ICT careers

The key issues resulting from the surveys are:

• a lack of knowledge/understanding of how different factors actually affect ICT enrolments
• collaborative activities between natural competitors (such as universities competing for students and graduates) are effective
• the concept of the “ICT profession” (really comprising a number of ICT professions) is complex, deriving at least in part from its multifaceted nature, and is neither well specified, communicated to, nor understood by key stakeholders
• improved understanding and perception of ICT is needed in terms of social (what it achieves) and industrial benefit rather than in academic or technical terms (what ICT is and does technically).

Universities:

All universities agreed that to increase ICT enrolments, student perceptions of the ICT professional would need to be more positive. Makes sense. 68% of universities said they had an effective student outreach program including activities such as visits to schools, offering university courses to high school students and teacher professional development. Further areas of outreach could include: publicising high levels of employment for ICT graduates, more aggressive publicity of job opportunities, ICT across diverse industry sectors and a focus on the social aspects of technology. The report suggests that current university efforts are more about winning individual market share and that a focus on broadly increasing ICT industry perceptions would improve all enrolments.

University Conclusion: University outreach activities need to be less-focused on institutional promotion and more focused on raising ICT industry perceptions, and that collaborative efforts with industry and other institutions need to be undertaken as appropriate in pursuit of this goal

Industry:

Industry was undecided as to whether there is a perception issue (43% agree, 33% disagree). However only 12% agreed that industry attempts to raise public perception if ICT were successful while 30% disagreed. Current activities include (unsuccessful) attempts to engage with schools directly, IBM’s Excite program and the I Choose Technology (Group X) program in Queensland. In general, industry respondents believed that their own attempts to raise public perception of ICT have been unsuccessful.

Industry Conclusion: the collective promotional activities by industry to improve perceptions of ICT should be improved by including a focus on social benefits resulting from the application of ICT in different industry sectors.

A question of marketing:

72% of industry responses said that a marketing campaign for ICT as a profession would improve perceptions (8% said no). The campaign needs to differentiate between the different types of ICT jobs that people can do (i.e. technical vs non-technical) and in a diverse range of industry sectors (health, mining, finance etc). Respondents liked CPA’s (Certified Practising Accountants) campaign to drive perceptions and quality for accredited accountants – but then again the survey responses mainly came from people involved in the tech industry’s equivalent – the Australian Computing Society.

My Conclusion:

I liked this article. It was a really interesting insight into the collective thoughts of universities and industry (mainly ACS reps). The main points I pulled were that a collaborative effort between all universities would increase total student numbers. Also, that individually industry was struggling to get cut through with their efforts to increase perceptions of ICT. A key issue seems to be the definition of the tech industry – does ‘tech’ relate to awesome startups smashing it on a global stage or does it relate to that trapped, lonely IT guy that resets your password on the first day back from holidays. Is a career in tech a globe trotting world of investments, pitching and trips to San Francisco – or is it living in fear that your job will be outsourced and you’ll have no competitive skills?

One issue with this survey is that it mainly includes the perceptions of ACS members – it doesn’t capture the boundless energy and creativity coming from the startup scene – a collective that may not see the need for professional accreditation by the ACS.

How to present STEM career choices to girls

The New Digital Learning Playbook: Understanding the Spectrum of Students’ Activities and Aspirations (2014, link)

This article discusses digital learning trends, use of technology in the classroom and confidence levels for boys/girls from K-12. Interesting information if that’s what you are after however the part that interested me the most was a review of students’ interests, differentiated by gender, in making STEM career choices.

The review begins with a table demonstrating that by Y9-12 the number of girls that assessed themselves as advanced tech users had dropped to almost half that of boys (17% v 32%). The conclusion from this is that if female students are not confident in their own tech abilities then they will be less likely to pursue tech careers.

It’s not all over though. A further chart says that 67% of female students are either somewhat interested or very interested in STEM related careers (79% in boys). The article then highlights that girls in particular are interested in socially based and digital career exploration opportunities that can be highly individualised to their interest levels.

A new approach to engaging girls in STEM fields may therefore include:

• Providing an online self-assessment of skills and interests (34%)
• Working with mentors who can guide college choices (32%)
• Access to websites and day-in-the-life videos for self-directed career exploration (28%)

Students were also interested in these general STEM career engagement ideas:

• Visiting companies to learn about careers (58%)
• Participating in school based career exploration programs (47%)
• Having teachers with a background in a STEM profession (43%)

It’s an interesting idea – reviewing how girls go about learning and then making sure that information is delivered in a similar fashion. Page 6 has a chart that shows that girls are more advanced tech users than boys in all aspects of digital writing (except texting conversations on gaming and HTML coding). The main broad categories that girls are strong in are digital media and writing (photography, creative writing, and journalism) and social media and online interactivity (blogging, tweets, instant messaging).

My general perception is that when talking tech with girls it is best to focus on results and outcomes. The idea that tech is a way of doing something, achieving a social outcome or helping overcome challenges.