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 Camp/Interactive (C/I) (Bronx, USA)

C/I (Camp/Interactive) is a Bronx based tech education program focused on supporting high-school students from underserved backgrounds. Its mission is “inspire and equip underserved students with the skills in computing, leadership, and professionalism needed to thrive in the Internet economy and beyond“. Starting in 2001 as a four week summer program (two weeks outdoor leadership training, two weeks intensive technology training) the program expanded in 2006 with a Bronx based learning centre and later added internships.

The program has three main components (from C/I website):

• Code/Interactive: students attend computer science education sessions at least twice a week at their schools with a C/I Teacher to work on self-directed computer science education modules in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Participating schools gain a robust curriculum, technology, teaching materials, access to other program elements (summits, camps and internships). [C/I’s website shows it is working with roughly 12 schools in the Bronx area.]
• Camp/Interactive: Young Entrepreneur Summits give C/I’s top students an opportunity to develop their technology skills in a unique environment. Each Y.E.S. program hosts panels of minority tech entrepreneurs to share their expertise with C/I students, equipping them with the tech and leadership skills needed to be successful in today’s fastest growing industry.
• Careers/Interactive: Successful students from C/I’s year-long programs apply for paid summer internships at top tech companies. Interns utilise their coding, prototyping, and leadership skills to gain hands-on work experience and training for a future career. Past internship hosts include GroupMe, RetailMeNot, GILT, AirBnB, Business Insider, The New York Times, FourSquare, General Assembly, CK-12, and Gust.

C/I lists its results as:

• Increase in college attendance rates: C/I students are five times as likely as their peers to go to college
• Break the poverty cycle: C/I provides graduates with skills that can double their household income
• Opportunities to join the workforce: 60% of C/I interns are offered full time employment

My thoughts:

There are many things I like about what I’m reading. The first is thoughtful links between the program elements. Offering in-school resources, coupled with more intensive camps/office visits for keen students and ending with the opportunity of a paid internship. I like that the program uses its own year long education program as a filter for companies looking to support interns – only students that complete the years worth of extra curricular study are offered internship positions. This both recognises/ensures the quality of the teaching, but also addresses employer side concerns about the quality/motivation of the students they are taking in. I imagine that if employers were also participating as mentors and hosting office visits then they would also have a chance to meet the students before taking them onboard as interns.

I also like that the program has an official signup process for schools. In Australia we face a challenge that often programs are introduced by a single motivated teacher, and are reliant on that one teachers’ passion and time to keep the program running. Ideally these programs would be taken in by the school and supported at the highest level – then actively promoted to teachers and parents alike as something the school is doing to improve its educational capacity. This is particularly important in the computer science realm where content moves fast, students learn fast and finding skilled educators can be tricky.

Finally, I like the program structure. It has clear opportunities to engage as volunteers, participants and financial sponsors. It appears measurable and it looks possible to track outcomes due to the high engagement with the students involved.

On Salesforce’s $6 million education grant

Salesforce is proud of its philanthropic credentials. The San Francisco based tech company employs a “1-1-1″ model where it sets aside 1 percent of its equity for a foundation (grants), 1 percent of its employees’ time as community service and 1 percent of its product as a donation. A few weeks ago the company announced it was donating $5 million to San Francisco’s public schools (an increase on last year’s $2.7 million donation) and $1 million to Code.org for computer science education. This is the biggest grant the company has ever gifted and represents 25% of the company’s annual grant giving budget (approx $20 million each year).

Here’s how the grant will be applied:

$2 million in 20 principal innovation grants of $100,000 each (no strings attached – generally used for 3D printers, classroom improvements, media studios, software licences etc)

$3 million will pay for infrastructure and training:

• 1,200 iPads
• 800 Google Chromebooks
• Expand to 48 Wi-Fi enabled digital classrooms across 12 middle schools and eight K-8 schools;
• Four full-time district technology instructors to assist the 20 schools
• Training for 100 teachers to go through professional development on computer science

$1 million for Code.org to support school computer science programs

• Computer science elective classes offered as a part of their school schedule
• Code.org’s “Code Studio” classes in middle and K-8 schools
• After school computer science classes hosted at salesforce.com offices in San Francisco

In addition, the Salesforce Foundation has pledged:

• 5,000 volunteer hours from Salesforce.com employees – an increase on the 1,500 hours in the 2013-2014 school year.

Sources:

• Salesforce Pours $6M Into SF Schools, Computer Science Education, TechCrunch, September 2014
• Press Release, Salesforce, Sept 2014
• Salesforce.com’s Benioff gives S.F. schools new $5 million gift, SF Gate, Sept 2014

 

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 Code.org’s Code Studio

Today Code.org announced its new Code Studio. This open source platform is designed to support students as young as kindergarten to pick up computer science concepts. It is still a visual programming language (similar to Scratch) but is HTML5 based (so runs in most browsers) and has puzzle based lesson plans for K-12. The lessons teach the usual loops, conditionals, and functions as well as branching into new topics such as how the internet works and digital citizenship. Other neat features are tools that let you build apps and new tutorial videos by tech celebrities.

For me, the most interesting part of this is the new teacher interface. This allows teachers to monitor where their students are in the lesson progression. An interesting idea that pushes Code.org further into the area of curriculum support/lesson plan development.

To help the rollout – Code.org is running training across 60 cities in the US – aiming to prepare up to 10,000 teachers to use the resource. [Source: Announcing Code Studio (Code.org blog, Sept 2014)]

My thoughts:

Nice! While there are a number of STEM related education organisations out there – Code.org is the one that consistently aims for scalable outreach. The organisation keeps coming up with new ways to keep its purpose relevant and on trend. In this case – if those planning the curriculum are moving too slow, then Code Studio is a solution for schools that are in a position to do more than the basics.

Its around this point that the organisation could start considering how it localises its product suite. While computer science concepts may not differ around the world – curriculums and teaching requirements do. In Australia they almost differ from state to state. It would be gold if someone could start mapping these Code.org classes against the local syllabus. Almost a localised wiki of lesson plans that complement the Code.org platform – or at least explain it in localised terms.

On Cracking the Girl Code: How to End the Tech Gender Gap

Girls Who Code is a fantastic US based not-for-profit that addresses the tech gender gap by offering activities that specifically support young girls with an interest in computer science. At its most practical – the NFP runs summer courses (seven weeks) for groups of girls around the country. The courses are facilitated by a trainer with financial support from a major tech companies.

Some background stats (US centric): only 12% of computer science graduates are female. Code.org estimates that by 2020 US universities will not be able to fill even a third of the country’s 1.4 million computing positions with qualified graduates. The industry needs to tap all areas of the economy to find skilled employees. Girls Who Code has gone from graduating 20 girls in 2012 to approx 3,000 in 2014. 95% of who go on to study computer science at university. Another insight is that girls place higher expectations on themselves – at a university level girls are likely to drop out if their marks hit a B+ while boys are happy with a B-.

The article outlines some strategies used by Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California to raise the percentage of women graduating from computer science from 10% to 40% in seven years.

These include:

• Emphasise problem-solving real-world issues because girls tend to want to help their communities.
• Group projects: research shows that girls flourish when they collaborate with others.
• Role models: help girls build a network of like minded people – a challenge as there are so few high-profile female programmers as role models

 

On Reasons Why Women Should Work in Software Engineering

 

Alaina Percival, CEO of the nonprofit Women Who Code, recently posted her thoughts on reasons more women should work in software engineering. Her post comes in response to the recent diversity reports from Google, Facebook and LinkedIn that show women hold just 15%-17% of technical roles in those organisations.

Here are 10 reasons why more women should work in software engineering:

1. Employers want to hire you.
2. Job security.
3. The potential for flexible schedules, working from home or anywhere in the world.
4. IT jobs constantly claim the top spots on “Top Job Lists”.
5. Tech can require a lot of collaboration — a skill often valued in women.
6. The career can be fulfilling for those who like to constantly learn new things.
7. You often need to think creatively and solve problems.
8. It is considered prestigious and this will likely increase over time.
9. There are many different career paths as you move up in your career.
10. In the future, all companies will be involved in technology, so no matter what sector you are interested in you could find an engineering role.

This list could really apply to anyone but its a great the diversity is being championed.

Why Every Child Should Learn Code

Article: Why Every Child Should Learn Code (Dan Crow, The Guardian, Feb 2014)

The Year of Code is a great UK initiative to promote computational thinking in UK based schools. While the Australian IT Curriculum is still in draft mode – the UK’s curriculum roles out in September 2014. Part of it is a requirement that every child learns to code.

In the future, not knowing the language of computers will be as challenging as being illiterate or innumerate are today.

Educators are focusing on coding, and its umbrella cousin computational thinking, because it teaches students to break problems down into smaller, more manageable pieces. The idea being that this logical approach to problem solving supports a generation interested in both computing and non computing careers.

Over the last week I have reviewed three articles on the myth of the STEM crisis – while they are all critical of the current hype/drive for more STEM university graduates they all support an increased focus on foundation science, computers and mathematics. Computational thinking fills the neat middle ground – as a discipline it is sufficiently pre-programming so as not to scare people away. The problem solving aspects are also satisfying enough to intrigue younger students and pique their interest in further studies in this area.

The Year of Code group intends to train teachers on the new  curriculum and promote the growth of coding culture in the UK. I can see how they are archiving the later (great marketing campaign, solid teaching tools) – more info in a link below.

Here are some good responses by the author:

“I’d take the Year of Code more seriously if it had more tech people involved”

Dan Crow: We are trying to making coding a mainstream activity. Most people in the UK can’t code, but many of them want to learn. What better way to engage with them than to have people who see the value of computational thinking, but also understand what it is like to learn it for the first time?

“Tech jobs are poorly paid and risky”

Dan Crow: Average salaries for software developers in the UK are well above the national average salary, and outsourcing to India or elsewhere is less common than you believe. But even more importantly, this is not about equipping children to become programmers – only a minority ever will. It’s about giving them the skills to be able to shape the world as it becomes an increasingly virtual one.

“Where will we get the teachers? All the good ones leave for better pay in industry jobs.”

Dan Crow: Plans are already at an advanced stage to cover most of this. Here are some links that talk about what’s going on beyond the Year of Code initiative: i) Google’s support of the excellent Code Club: LINK, ii) Regional training days for the Computing curriculum: LINK, iii) £2M to the BCS to train 16,000 teachers: LINK and, iv) Google giving 15,000 Raspberry Pis to schools: LINK

…and now for some bonus time comments section summary:

• How will teachers cope with this on top of all the other things they have to teach?
• Do we really need to teach kids to code? Surely the ones that like it will pick it up naturally
• Computer programmers earn low salaries and have insecure career paths
• Is the Year of Code simply a flash in the pan marketing excercise?

As a final word: this interview with Lottie Dexter, the Year of Code project leader, picked up a fair bit of criticism – worth watching:

…A more critical review

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.