26 | INDUSTRY | CODING IN SCHOOL S
Whatever the reason, one thing is certain:
RECENT RESEARCH BY OCADO TECHNOLOGY REVEALED THAT
OF PARENTS WEREN’T AWARE THAT 65%
PRIMARY SCHOOLS WILL BE TEACHING A NEW COMPUTING PROGRAMME THAT INCLUDES
CODING
implementing the curricular changes has thrown up a number of challenges. For a start, there’s the problem of winning over sceptical mums and dads. Recent research by Ocado Technology revealed that 65% of parents weren’t aware that primary schools will be teaching a new computing programme that includes coding. Chances are that many of those parents won’t even know what coding is. Dr Carol Porter, a fellow at NAACE (the National
Association of Advisors for Computers in Education), insists there’s nothing to be afraid of: “People immediately take the adult meaning of coding,” she says, “but this initiative is more about teaching children to put instructions in the right order to get their desired outcome. 'I’m hungry. I want to make a jam sandwich. What do I do first?' You have to take the lid off the jam before you can put your knife in. It’s about thinking things through, and that’s the big difference between the new curriculum and the old: we want children to have a better understanding of computational thinking.” And then there’s the small matter of equipping
THE GOVERNMENT HAS PROVIDED BCS WITH MORE THAN
TO SET UP A NETWORK OF “MASTER TEACHERS”
£2M 400
TO TRAIN TEACHERS IN OTHER SCHOOLS AND PROVIDE RESOURCES FOR USE IN THE CLASSROOM
teachers with this newfangled knowledge, not to mention the skills to convey it in a way that young children will be able to understand. “The immediate, proximate challenge is that we have 3,500 secondary schools and 17,000 primary schools, each with multiple teachers, all of whom are saying, ‘You’re asking us to do something that’s entirely new,’” explains Peyton Jones. To help school staff, a number of initiatives
A FURTHER HAS BEEN GIVEN TO CAS TO HELP
ALREADY WORKING IN THE CLASSROOM, THROUGH ONLINE RESOURCES AND IN SCHOOL WORKSHOPS
PRIMARY TEACHERS
£1.1M TRAIN
have been put in place since the announcement of the new curriculum. The government has provided BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, with more than £2m to set up a network of 400 'Master Teachers' to train teachers in other schools and provide resources for use in the classroom. A further £1.1m has been given to CAS to help train primary teachers already working in the classroom, through online resources and in school workshops. And scholarships – backed by Microsoft, Google, IBM and Facebook – are being offered to computer-science teachers. Then there’s the government-backed 'Year of
Code', an independent, non-profit campaign – launched in February – that aims to promote coding by organising events, commissioning detailed polling and analysis, and crowdsourcing funding to help educational organisations. One of its events was a week-long programme in March that encouraged all schools to teach every pupil at least one hour of coding during those seven days. Another initiative is the Barefoot Computing
project, created by BCS. Says Bill Mitchell, Director of Education at the Institute: “Barefoot Computing will create primary-school-friendly classroom resources that exemplify how to teach computing through topics that are relevant to the
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