Teaching ICT and Computer Science: Some Thoughts

The New Year has started with an – apparently orchestrated – tirade against the teaching of ICT in Britain’s schools. It came in for severe criticism from Ofsted at the back end of 2011, the Royal Society has chipped in with a report from Steve Furber (of BBC Micro fame), Michael Gove has made a major speech at BETT on the subject and Google’s Eric Schmidt has made several pronouncements, notably criticising the Arts/Science divide that permeates British society. It’s worth noting that the latter problem isn’t exactly new; C P Snow wrote novels about it in the 1950s, not so long after Britain’s very survival had depended critically on the technological expertise of its scientists, mathematicians and engineers. In any event, there’s general agreement that students are bored by the presentation of ICT – as for users rather than creators of software – and this is reflected in the rapidly falling numbers of those taking the subject further.

So, you may say, the IAP is pretty late to the party. Well, yes. But anyone can dash off a quick knee-jerk press release. We feel it may be more helpful to let the dust settle and offer a considered view, taking into account the contributions of others.

So first, is ICT teaching really in such a parlous state? As so often, it’s not black and white. Many teachers have responded to the tide of criticism by saying that they do teach Java, C#, how to write smart phone apps and so on, despite not being required to do so but recognising that their students won’t see any relevance otherwise. Again, there’s nothing new here. Good teachers have always taught the subject not the syllabus. Of course, precisely because such teaching is ‘off-piste’, so to speak, there’s only anecdotal evidence for it, so it’s pretty much impossible to say what percentage of students benefit from it. But the number of students passing A level Computing has declined by 60% in under a decade, which should tell us something.

There’s also a way in which the industry itself has contributed to the boredom factor through, paradoxically, its responsible behaviour. How? Well, I’ll illustrate with an example from nearly 35 years ago. At the time, I was teaching a group of A level Computer Science students and we had just taken delivery of a shiny new RM 380Z computer. For those shorter in the tooth than I (which had better be most of you or we’re in serious trouble) this had a Zilog Z80 processor running at a dizzying 4MHz or about 1/250th the speed of a modern smart phone. It had 4KB of RAM, into which one had to cram not just a program and its data but a BASIC interpreter, unless, of course, one was writing direct machine code (no room, alas, for an assembler). With the interpreter in RAM, it didn’t take long for some students to notice that they could modify its behaviour, at the simplest level by altering the command look-up table. Today, we’d call that hacking and regard it as very bad form indeed. And, of course, it did briefly confuse some students who wondered why ‘IF’ was suddenly behaving like ‘PRINT’ or whatever. But they all learnt more about interpreters in an hour or so than I’d put into half a dozen lectures. And had fun doing it.

Now of course I’m not advocating tearing down the myriad shields and sentinels that we’ve painstakingly added to our systems as the world has become more and better connected. But it is important to recognise that these layers of security have raised barriers to learning as well as to those of malign intent.

So, what to do? I thought you’d never ask. By an extraordinary coincidence, this month sees the launch of the Raspberry Pi, a small, very cheap, single board computer designed precisely for the sort of tinkering that my students of yesteryear took for granted. See http://www.raspberrypi.org/ for full details.

We’re never going to get back to the 70s and early 80s, when pretty much the only way to get a microcomputer to do something useful was to write the code yourself but this seems like the next best thing. So I encourage all IAP members to consider how they might support the Raspberry Pi project. After all, it’s in all our interests to ensure that there’s an adequate pool of technically literate and enthusiastic youngsters wanting to enter the industry. And, as things stand, that’s not a given.