Computer science reboot

It seems like a dream come true, to wake up this morning and learn that Michael Gove has formally endorsed the teaching of computing science in the school curriculum.

When I first sensed that the ICT curriculum was not fit for purpose, rather than run around telling everyone to prepare for a flood, I thought it better to start building an ark. Now the floods have arrived and we are ready to set sail!

It felt like the UK curriculum had been transported back in time to the 1950s with the ebacc was announced in January last year, a time before computing technology had made a significant impact. Now twelve months later, after a long battle to raise the profile of computing in the curriculum, it seems our prayers have been answered.

All morning I have been greeted by well-wishers in person, on the phone, tweets and emails sharing the great news that we can ensure that the children we are teaching now, not in three or four years time, can benefit immediately from this announcement.

Alan Turing Year, 2012, looks set to be a monumental year in the field of computing science and once again we can restore the UK's reputation as a global leader in the field of computing science. You could almost see Alan Turing dancing with delight, as a sprightly centenarian, discovering first that computing education from age eight was being discussed in parliament, then witnessing the surge in demand for the Raspberry Pi computer designed and developed here in the UK, then upon hearing that the giants of the computing industry Google and Microsoft had joined with The Guardian to encourage computing in education, then rounding the year off with the popular success of Young Rewired State 2012.

Right now, my memory drifts back 30 years ago, to my childhood experiences of computers which involved spending every lunch and break in school bashing out programs on the keys of a BBC Micro, then - to give my finger tips some respite - spending every evening and weekend on the more gentle rubber keys of my Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home.

Many of our current generation of programmers, developers and computer scientists cite the home computing boom of the 1980s as their cue to a career in computing. Then, as now, computing science did not feature widely in the curriculum and was purely something extra curricular.

A decade later, the introduction of graphic user interfaces (Windows), the mouse, Microsoft Powerpoint and then the World Wide Web became desirable features of ICT lessons across the UK.

An immediate shortage of specialist ICT teachers was solved by recruiting non-specialist teachers other curriculum areas. I started my own teaching career as a Design Technology teacher until the gravitational field of ICT sucked me in whole.

In the decade following the introduction of the ICT curriculum the UK, once a world class computing champion, witnessed both a surge in demand and a downturn in success. UK software developers, together with the games and interactive entertainment industry, report a deepening chasm in recruitment to their profession. Universities have experienced a decline in applications to undergraduate courses in computing sciences, likewise, colleges report similar falls in applications to A level computing courses. A common thread dominates conversations with university staff and industry – ICT is not the same as computing.

At our school, we decided to fully embrace the computing curriculum without waiting to be informed by curriculum changes, purely because it felt the right thing to do. Since doing so, we have been harvesting the rich experiences and achievement it has brought our children. There is a huge amount of educational value to be gained from studying computing science, for example studying and emulating the way that the human brain works. 

Our first venture four years ago was to add Scratch to the staple diet of all our pupils. It was a runaway success from the start. Children were freely downloading it at home and quickly sharing games they created in lesson and developed at home. One measure of this success came in 2011 when two girls from our school won a UK programming competition in Scratch.

A simple description of Scratch is to think of it as "programming with Lego bricks". There is a global Scratch community who are very supportive, and if you are not already a member, I highly recommend you join up to share the successes we experienced.

Since winning with Scratch, we have become more adventurous, experimenting with an array of programming languages and resources. The responses from children has been highly encouraging. This year we introduced the OCR GCSE Computing qualification. Although we do have one class, it didn't attract the huge amount of interest I anticipated. The main reason being that children struggle to understand exactly what "computing" is. This year, in an effort to boost understanding, I recorded a hack rap to help the children develop a better awareness of what computing science is, this has been a huge hit at school (you can read the words or download it here hack rap).

Our next move was to introduce more programming into our ICT curriculum, the bravest move being teaching Python programming language to all Year 7.

I have been blogging about this and recording interviews with pupils. We have not stopped there and our computing journey continues to develop.

One particular ambition of mine has been to encourage girls to take a more active interest in computing in school, and I have experimented with a range of strategies. I have definitely encountered a better response from girls in Year 7 & 8 who will quite often beat boys in their class in programming challenges. Sadly, I find by Year 9 – many girls subscribe to the ludicrous Yorkie mentality- that it's "not for girls", and my biggest regret is that in Year 10 we have no girls studying computing.

To engage interest from both boys and girls, we hold a programme of events out of school. At our last two events Inside The Machine  and After Hours, just over 10% of the participants were girls (not counting mums and grandma), clearly much room for improvement. The After Hours event was attended by 50 children, parents and grandparents from around our region. Teams competed against teams to solve a programming challenge in Scratch.

Our next event, Hack To The Future, promises to be our most successful yet with over 300 people attending from our region and beyond. The principal aim of the day is to provide children with an amazing range of experiences and insight into the world of computing science – the digital creators of today will meet the digital creators of tomorrow. We have 100 digital creators/speakers lined up to engage 200 children in the field of computing science. The support and encouragement we have received from this community has been both dramatic and overwhelming. As well as the big corporations like Microsoft and Google, we also have universities and local software developers contributing to the success of the event. We are also very proud to announce a worldwide exclusive, the BBC Research & Development team will be revealing their new coding platform, dubbed "BBC Micro II" at our event.

To learn more about developing computing science in your curriculum, I recommend you join the Computing at School free network. To visit a Hack To The Future event near you, please contact Alan O'Donohoe @teknoteacher.

Alan O'Donohoe is Principal Teacher of ICT at Our Lady's High School, Preston. He has been teaching for just short of 20 years. In the Summer of 2011 he taught himself how to program with Python. He seeks to evangelise teachers to teach computing science through his blogs, tweets and audioboos. 

The next Hack to the Future event is on Saturday, 12th February in Preston – the event is highly anticipated and now has a waiting list of speakers but there are spaces for more children to take part so if you are interested in taking a party of children (or even one child) then see here for more details or look at the flyer designed for children.

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