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 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 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)

Training computer science teachers (UK)

In April 2013 the British Government announced it would provide £2 million to create 16,000 computer teachers (ed: £125 per teacher?). The BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) – formerly the British Computer Society – is charged with delivering the program. In real terms this program looks like £1 million a year over two years to train 400 ‘master teachers’ in computer science, most likely through the BCS Academy of Computing.  Each of these teachers is then expected to train up to 40 schools (hence 16,000 teachers).

The program builds on the BCS/Computing at School’s existing Network of Excellence, an initiative to connect university educators with school teachers and support ongoing teacher professional development.  As of September 2012 approximately 570 schools had registered for the program – by May 2014 is was about 1000.

Thoughts:

Sounds great. The UK Government computer teacher funding initiatives are a response to their changes to the national curriculum. Makes sense that if you are going to change the curriculum you’d need a concerted effort to retrain teachers. My questions would be around the declining numbers of teachers pursuing computer science as a discipline – can the UK find 400 master teachers? This article (Reboot ICT teacher training to halt the computing brain drain, David Grover, May 2014) painted a fairly grim picture of the projected computer science teacher pipeline here in Australia.

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.