LONDON — Estonia is teaching first graders how to create their own computer games and offering scholarships to entice more undergraduates into technology-driven disciplines. In England, an updated national curriculum will soon expose every child in the state school system to computer programming, starting at age five. The American “Hour of Code” effort says it has already persuaded 28 million people to give programming a try.
Around the world, students from elementary school to the Ph.D. level are increasingly getting acquainted with the basics of coding, as computer programming is also known. From Singapore to Tallinn, governments, educators and advocates from the tech industry argue that it has become crucial to hold at least a basic understanding of how the devices that play such a large role in modern life actually work.
Such knowledge, the advocates say, is important not only to individual students’ future career prospects, but also for their countries’ economic competitiveness and the technology industry’s ability to find qualified workers.
Exposing students to coding from an early age helps to demystify an area that can be intimidating. It also breaks down stereotypes of computer scientists as boring geeks, supporters argue. Plus, they say, programming is highly creative: Studying it can help to develop problem-solving abilities, as well as equip students for a world transformed by technology.
“We don’t teach music in school to make everyone a concert violinist,” says Clive Beale, director of educational development at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a nonprofit organization based near Cambridge, England that promotes computer studies in schools. “We’re not trying to make everyone a computer scientist, but what we’re saying is, ‘this is how these things work, it’s good for everyone to understand the basics of how these things work. And by the way, you might be really good at it.”’Continue reading the main story
On top of that, the supporters say, children love it.
“Kids these days are all stuck to their phones, their tablets, and are constantly using technology, but very few of them are learning how to create it,” said Roxanne Emadi, a strategist at Code.org, an advocacy group based in Seattle that is behind the Hour of Code effort. “Even if it’s something simple, like a kid programming a maze or programming a robot, when you can see your work brought to life, that’s where light bulbs go off.”
Teachers “are using it like candy: ‘If you finish your work, we can do 10 minutes of the computer science tutorials at the end of class as a treat,”’ she said. “When you’re teaching 8-year-olds, the stereotypes haven’t set in yet.”
In Estonia, widely regarded as one of Europe’s technology-savvy societies, raising computer literacy even higher is a top national priority. Before becoming technology skills coordinator at the country’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, Ave Lauringson led ProgeTiiger, a project training schoolteachers to engage pupils with programming and other high-tech areas.
The effort, she said, is continuing to grow, along with demand. “Parents are looking for after-school activities for their kids and asking ‘Where can I put my kids to do coding?’ Or ‘Where is a robotics class?”’
A joint public-private effort called the IT Academy is concentrating on the university level, seeking to improve fields like software engineering and cybersecurity by hiring more professors, recruiting students from abroad and offering scholarships for graduate and undergraduate studies.
Kristiina Rahkema, studying for masters’ degrees in software engineering and math at the University of Tartu, Estonia, said she relished the opportunities opened by computing skills.
“If I had a good idea, I could just start a company,” she said. Anyone who can code, she said, “will never have trouble finding a job, all of the companies are searching for candidates.”
She said she hoped to see girls in particular let go of preconceptions about programming as a boring grind: “It is a lot more fun than they think. You have an idea, you write some code and it actually works,” she said. “That’s a really good feeling.”
Britain’s education secretary, Michael Gove, seems to agree. He has pushed hard to rewrite a computing curriculum that he has said has bored youngsters with mundane instruction on how to operate outdated programs. The new curriculum, which comes into effect in September, will take a more rigorous approach. Starting at age five, all students in England will learn the basics of coding, and beginning at 11 they will be instructed in the use of at least two programming languages.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is offering lesson plans and other resources to teachers, especially those at the primary level who lack specialized training. Projects like setting up a camera by a bird feeder, and programming it to post photos online, can quickly help students see the potential uses of coding.
“Instead of passively using a tablet or a laptop, it’s the first time they’ve made a computer do something,” said Clive Beale, the foundation’s director of educational development. “The end goal might be to send a camera into near space as part of a science project: It can be investigating math, it can be robotics and there’s some fantastic art stuff,” along with applications in music — and even gym class.
Singapore, too, is planning to introduce coding to schoolchildren. Even in such a technology-friendly society, the field’s image is improving only slowly, said Min-Yen Kan, a computing professor and assistant dean at the National University of Singapore.
One big factor in a recent growth of interest is the availability of programming resources online, letting those new to coding try programs out in a web browser and see right away whether they work, he said.
Professors at the university are reaching out to students in fields like biology, engineering, chemistry and medicine with instruction in the programming languages that predominate in their fields, Mr. Kan said.
With the work world becoming ever more tech-focused, “we have to match that in the education sector,” said David Rossiter, a professor of engineering education at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which recently introduced a requirement that all science and engineering undergraduates study programming in their first or second year.
Now, with demand also coming from students in other areas such as the humanities, “the queues are more than we can handle,” Mr. Rossiter said. “I have to turn down 200 students this semester who are trying to take my course.”
Undergraduate computer science enrollment has generally been cyclical, tracking the fortunes of the technology industry through its boom and bust years, said Peter Harsha, director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association, a group of North American university departments and other tech research institutes.
That now seems to be changing: In the 2011-2012 academic year, the number of computer science majors in the United States rose by 29 percent, and forthcoming figures seem likely to show a sixth consecutive annual increase, he said.
He hopes efforts like Code.org will get more young people interested. “When you see the sad state of K-12 computer science, you see that there’s room to grow in a big way,” he said, using a shorthand term for education from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Code.org is pressing to get computer science into every American school, and it is working on teacher training with some of the country’s biggest school districts, including New York, Chicago and Broward County in Florida. More than 35,000 teachers have signed up to use its tutorials in the classroom, Ms. Emadi said.
More work is crucial if technology is to continue to develop, said Mr. Beale: “If we run out of computer scientists and engineers, there will be no new devices.”Continue reading the main story