Posts by Boring Weirdo Willard

Comment from the Cockwomble in question

Hey all,

I am the cockwomble who wrote the original piece. Just wanted to chip into the thread and give you all a bit of explanation. Yes - you're offended, I get it. I deliberately wrote the piece to get a reaction from the developer community, and raise awareness of the way the ICT curriculum is changing to making coding mandatory.

Yes, I use deliberately evocative and provocative language. I called you all "boring weirdos". As commenters have pointed out, as a fan of warhammer 40k, World of Warcraft, not to mention online dating, I'm a weirdo, and yes, I'm boring. If you're neither boring, nor a weirdo, then great. The reason that line was there was to draw people into the article. I knew the general reader would look at it and think "Stereotype, check", and the Dev community would be annoyed. I perhaps underestimated just *how* annoyed or offended... If you were personally offended, then I apologise.

Some people have commented that the article is deliberately written to be trolling clickbait to raise advertising revenue from page views; with only one ad per page, and people (especially developers) less likely to click on a banner ad than to summit Everest, I'm sure you can divine that's not the purpose. Even if it was, how many people go "I'M FURIOUS ABOUT THIS ARTICLE! Ooooh, a new Mazda is out!"? There's no premium on low traffic or high traffic writers at the Telegraph, so it wouldn't benefit me either way.

So why did I include the "boring weirdos" line? The article was intended to be challenging - offensive even - for the sole purpose of getting people to read it and think about whether or not kids should be taught to code. My personal opinion is that the new curriculum (it's here if you want to read it: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-i-the-order-for-replacing-ict-with-computing-and-ii-the-regulations-for-disapplying-aspects-of-the-existing-national-curriculum) is far too ambitious, and teaches the wrong skills. It's more likely to put kids off learning to code than bring them into it. I think it will be hard to train every primary teacher in the country in the two programming languages the curriculum requires.

Some have questioned whether there's really a crisis in ICT and IT teaching, as I claimed. In the last Ofsted figures, a fifth of ICT lessons were seen as poor, and barely half were rated good or better. (Source:http://t.co/MpwuihnZQI). if you're familiar with Ofsted, you'll know teaching has to practically negligent to rate as poor.

Speaking to people in the tech industry, and in University Computer science departments, they tell me they are worried about the people coming through the system. This year, only 4,000 people out of 300,000 took computing at A-level - less than 2%. Most people who go on to study at University are self-taught hobbyists (Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9600921/Computer-programming-who-is-teaching-our-children-to-code.html).

In the background of a fifth of our schools failing their pupils in this area, you have to ask if Gove’s proposals are feasible - especially as they go much further than the current curriculum and require a legion of teachers to be retrained. There's a seeming tension between identifying a problem like this and saying "don't teach our kids to code". However the problem I see is that the current (relatively undemanding) IT curriculum is being badly taught across the board. I just don't see how the new, fantastically ambitious one, can be implemented successfully.

Yes, there are excellent teaching resources like Scratch, that teach the fundamentals in a more interesting and fun way, However, assuming that primary teachers can just make the time to fit learning these to a suitable standard to be able to teach them into their existing workload is arguably, just as insulting as my "boring weirdo" line both to those teachers (I don't know a single primary school teacher who would have the time to do that, and you can guarantee they won't be given any assistance in doing so - when teaching other languages was mooted for primary schools it was decided that teachers would be able to "pick it up to a suitable standard to teach" with a single half-day course) and to people who do programme (that their subject is so simple and uncomplicated that it can be picked up in no time at all, to a standard suitable for teaching, by pretty much anybody).

Yes, coding and programming are useful skills with applications in other areas, but there are only so many hours in the school day. How on earth you can write a coding syllabus that is teachable in multiple ability classrooms all over the UK, that won't be so out of date that what the students are being taught would have absolutely no relevance anyway.

Yes, general programming principles are (largely) transferable between computer languages but please don't underestimate the ability of students to be completely put off. A lot of commentators assume it's easy to transfer a skill (E.g., planning and writing a programme) from one language to another; in fact, for the large majority of the population (and particularly, though not exclusively, young people), that simply is not the case. Equally, while coding can be a good way of teaching skills like critical thinking and problem solving, it's neither the only, nor necessarily the best way of doing so.

So whilst I'm sure there are some students who would be able to benefit from such education, I also know that at least an equally large number would not, would not be interested in the slightest (no matter how the subject is presented), and that getting an already overworked primary school teacher to try and teach a completely unfamiliar subject to a class of 30 comprising both extremes of ability and interest is simply not going to work. At all. And worse, I suspect it will probably be counter-productive, potentially turning off any interest in the subject for some who might otherwise have benefited.

I think the better way to do it is through the existing volunteer architecture, through schemes like Code Club. Indeed, I fear that the excellent volunteer efforts will be choked off if it becomes a compulsory subject - as has happened to some extent with debating since it was included as a mandatory part of citizenship classes.

I considered, but eventually rejected the following paragraph (for reasons of length):

"The teaching skills gap is supposed to be filled by people coming in from industry, volunteering their time to teach teachers and pupils. The success of brilliant schemes like Code Club is held up as an example of how that can happen. However, Code Club is an outlier - there's a big difference between teaching a room full of motivated kids who want to be there, and teaching the average class on a wet Wednesday. Indeed, there's a big difference for the IT professional volunteering their time if they are greeted by an enthusiastic teacher-hobbyist, or a sour faced teaching unions reps in their mid-fifties, who think the whole thing is a Tory plot to take their jobs."

I sort of regret leaving that out - although I'm sure the extra insults to teachers wouldn't have helped my cause.

Several of the Code Club volunteers - notably @tef and @mattbee got in touch and called me out for calling them and their students "boring weirdos" - both wrote excellent pieces about why I'm wrong and a massive tool to boot. However, I honestly wrote the piece because I think what they are doing is infinitely better than what the Government has proposed. @Tef told me Code Club has 500 schools on the waiting list - if you hate me, and the article, and think kids *should* learn to code, and want to push back on the stereotypes I was perpetuating, then the best way of showing that is by signing up with them.

I set out to create a debate around the issue - by challenging what I saw as an orthodoxy around teaching ALL kids to code. I think it's a bad idea - and I made the point in a provocative way. I'm sorry if that fucked you off. I can guarantee more of the Dev community knows about the proposed curriculum after the article than before hand. If I get a @ mentions feed full of hate, and a dozen angry devs join Code Club, job done.

Obviously, I'd prefer not to have my house burned down (as someone threatened last night), but them's the lumps.

Regards, Willard