Teach your
Are our children acquiring the right computer skills for the working world? Shirley Redpath asks whether we are overdue in taking a completely new approach to teaching IT as a subject.
children A
ntonio Tajani, the European commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship is a worried man. As he launched Europe’s ‘e-skills
week’ in April, he announced the results of research by the European Commission into IT skills demand and supply. The research forecast a shortfall of 700,000 graduates with the required IT and digital skills by 2015, with the gap continuing to widen into the next decade unless something is done about it. “(The) supply (of skilled workers) has become a bottleneck for growth in the tech sector, creating a leaky pipeline that threatens to hamper European innovation and global competitiveness,” Tajani said. The problem, according to many observers, is the failure of the education systems in most countries to engage
children by teaching them how computers work, rather than how to work with computers. “We are long overdue a completely new approach to teaching IT as a subject,” comments Karen Price OBE, CEO e-skills UK. “Despite young people being avid users of technology, from mobile phones to video games, the number of students choosing to study computing related courses at school continues to decline.”
This is not how the industry got its heady start. First developed in the UK, the computer was initially seen as a very sophisticated piece of computational hardware that users would program to perform whatever tasks were required of it. Consequently, industry and academia realised that there would be a need for programming skills in the future and began to gear up to produce them. In addition to the development of several computer science courses at universities around the country, there
The problem is the failure of the education systems in most countries to engage children by teaching them how computers work, rather than how to work with computers
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