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The kids are alright… aren’t they?

With falling interest in IT in schools, what can be done to reinvigorate enthusiasm for such a key subject?

By Tom Brewster, 16 Aug 2010 at 16:46

The second point, if you’ve decided there is a value, is what is the best way of actually teaching schoolchildren about computing. What is it you are actually trying to teach them? I think the people in the group felt that computing is as important for schoolchildren as mathematics.

Every human being who walks and talks and thinks has to have an understanding of mathematics to cope in the modern day society – the same is true with computing.

We need to go away and gather evidence of the state of schools is at the moment, of how many specialist computing teachers there are, what is it that those teachers need in order to improve what is going on in the classroom, and then figure out what is the best way to do that.

So, do we need to change the curriculum? Do we need to change the way teachers are trained? Do we need more teachers who have studied computing at university? These are questions we will look into.

What do you hope will happen as a result of the report?

The outcomes I would like to see are a lot more specialist computing teachers in schools, and a lot more collaboration between universities, industry and professional bodies and Government in getting the right resources to the teachers. That doesn’t necessarily mean money.

We have a marvelous window of opportunity here, if you look at the incredible amount of support the Royal Society has.

We helped them do some fundraising and we received almost immediate support from universities like Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow – the list just goes on and on. Universities are falling over themselves to offer support for this report.

Similarly if you go and talk to industry, if you talk to IBM, Microsoft, Google, all of those people, they are desperate to help resolve this problem. Practically all of the big organisations that you would want help from at the moment are falling over themselves to try and do something about this problem.

We can actually do something because everyone wants it solved.

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2 comments

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Dont go into IT

If the job can be done via a compuetr screen then it can be done by a china man in china for a bowl of rich. There is NO future in IT in developed high cost countries. Not a day goes by when i dont hear of more jobs flocking out of the uk to low cost countries. I've been in IT for nearly 30 yrs and I'm still employed but I don't believe that will be for very much longer. I dont recommend IT for my kids. We need plumbers!

By mickxxx on Tuesday Aug 17

Stay away from IT

I have been working in IT for the last 15 years of my life.
When I started I loved it immensely, it was so much fun.
I still do but if there was anything else at all I could do
I would get out of it in a shot. You never know when that tap
on your shoulder will arrive to tell you to go and get the job elsewhere
as your position has been 'outsourced'.
Not a day goes by that you don't hear about outsourcing.
Things have changed within my company to the point of being desperate.
The quality of work is absolutely shockingly bad but the low cost of producing
it is the only thing that matters nowadays. How very shortsighted.
The cost of labor may have gone down but the overall cost of providing service to the
business is gone through the roof. The additional cost of wrestling
with countless new problems introduced with poor testing,
terrible quality of code,providing it runs to begin with, which most of the time simply
gets overwritten as fixing it would take way too long, countless errors if the application
even goes live etc.
That is the incalculable cost that is not visible to the business users.
I have applied a lot of pressure on my niece and nephew not to get into IT
under any circumstances and now they are really grateful for it. I read the report
that Pentagon in USA is panicking because nobody wants to study IT any more so
Americans are worried about 'loosing technological edge'. They've lost that a long time ago.
Why would anybody in their right mind want to spent years pumping money into their child's
education knowing darn well that a few years down the line their jobs will not be there any more.
I know a lot of people that lost their jobs in IT especially in the last few years. Most of them left IT
allthgether and would not even consider coming back. I am spending every day of my life trying to do the same.