Yesterday I suggested that we start teaching children to code as early as possible. I suggested a couple of points in support of this. My main point was to instill in the computer users of the future that computer use is about much more than just utilising the software installed on the machine but is about shaping the computer into an appropriate tool for your problems. Coding, of some sort, is a necessary element of this shaping process. This applies whether we are connecting tools from the standard toolset together using a shell to create new pipelines, writing new tools in Python or other similar languages, or crafting software from scratch in assembly. They all require similar basic problem solving abilities which are actually not really about computing.
My other point was to give children a head start in learning their tools and to ensure that they have the time necessary to learn them well. There is an article by Peter Norvig named "
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" [
http://norvig.com/21-days.html ] which takes issue with the teach yourself programming in x days/weeks/months series of books. Basically you can learn the syntax of a language in a few days but to really program well using that language requires experience and knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of that lanaguage, not to mention learning the, probably extensive, standard and third-party libraries that mean that you don't have to constantly reinvent the wheel. This obviously takes time, and I am not for a moment suggesting that our Children should be learning a vast array of languages and leaving junior school as ready-made software developers. What I do expect though is that, given that a lot of active learning is about assimilating and organising information, a child should be able to reach for the computer as the primary tool to work with information, in the same way that during the pre-computer age we would reach for a pen and paper when needing to make notes. I want to go further than this though, using the computer as an information management tool is quite straightforward with tools such as text editors and spreadsheets but this is to deny the child the real power of the machine, the power to bend the machine to their will, the power of coding.
How do we do this? Well the approach taken by the
Raspberry Pi [
http://www.raspberrypi.org/ ] project might be a start. However I worry that this approach distances us from the computers that we meet in every day life. What might be better would be to make sure that the computers that our children encounter contain the basic tools that they need in order to use the machine in the ways that I outlined above. One approach might be to start installing a Linux as the default learning environment so that programming tools are there as standard but that is a whole 'nother can of worms that I don't fancy opening today. Another approach might be through play or writing games. Yet another might be through embedding computing tools at all levels within the curriculum. Of course any of these approaches will require effort but isn't that a part of the continual process of ensuring that our children are taught the things that they need to know and that teachers have the skills necessary to do so.
Why is it worth doing this? In the "
Reading, Writing, Programming?" [
http://www.itworld.com/software/228381/new-school-curriculum-reading-writing-... ] article at ITWorld there is the following comment:
We're living in an exciting time when someone with a hot business idea, Javascript coding skills, and a free Amazon cloud account can get an internet application up and running in a weekend - and put out iOS and Android apps almost as quickly. That kind of freedom should be the kind of thing that appeals to kids looking for their 'ticket out of the ghetto'.
Perhaps this is the path we should be enabling. Inspiring the entrepreneurial spirit, as early as possible, and giving young people the tools for success.
