The world according to Andrew

That was the title of a recent BBC News article about the current lack of interest in Computer Science among UK students. It’s also the slogan of a new campaign aimed at getting school kids interested in computer science and programming. Well I don’t know about you but I can’t think of a worse slogan to boost interest – I hated latin at school and i’ve used < 10% (see what I did there) of what I learnt since I left school. Is coding a dead language? I don’t think so. Firstly coding by it’s nature is a collection of languages, algorithms, techniques. Maybe you could say “Cobol – the new latin” but Scala, Javascript, Objective-C, C++, Java etc etc. I don’t think so – one of the wonders of programming is the sheer variety of subsets and supersets of languages and approaches.

I’ve written at length in the past about the need to make coding and computer science more interesting to children. I think it’s really, really important, but I don’t think this campaign is going to do much to inspire them.

There have been suggestions made in the past by others about how this talent drain might be stemmed. I’m fully behind the various calls to use outputs such as computer games to garner interest for example. However, i’d also love to see teachers look towards the semantic web, the internet of things, robotics, automation (just look at bigdog, the google car etc etc) and the concepts of a connected society to inspire and enthuse the next generation of technologists (btw, it’s NOT just programming, that’s like saying when I grow up I want to be a hammer operator).

Perhaps the real problem is with the quality of teachers and their depth of experience, I would wager very few come from industry – maybe they don’t deserve that pension (i’m generalising and don’t mean to offend)? I also really don’t care too much about the current discussions about getting more girls involved in tech. To me it all boils down to making the topic interesting, getting the right teachers to inspire, exploring the breadth of what technology means and making the topic more accessible (fingers crossed for Rasperry PI). Then the right people will choose their career path because they are passionate, interested and engaged. The focus should’t be on gender – if it were then there should be a campaign to get more male beauty therapists (again, i’m being glib).

Finally, the fact that there’s a lot of early technologists approaching retirement age, looking at their achievements, their careers and most importantly, their legacies can only help push this forward and if I can do my bit, I will.