A radical manifesto for teaching computing

There is a growing consensus that the way children are taught in schools of information technology is in need of radical reform. By John Naughton explains the problem and proposes a manifesto for revolutionary action

An intense debate has begun - in government and elsewhere - what should be done on information and communication technologies (ICT) into school curricula. - Several agencies of the Royal Society, the Association of Learning Technologies at the School of Information Technology (a grassroots organization of teachers in question) and the British Computer Society, to name only four published reports and working papers to Ministers and the Ministry of Education. Michael Gove, the Education Minister made a speech enigmatic recent technology conference BETT indicating that a redesign is in progress in the bowels of Whitehall. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest, there are some surprising facts that occur as the fact that over one million people have already placed orders for Raspberry Pi, the computer cheap credit card sized developed by geeks Cambridge, which began shipping last week.

So something is happening: there is a sense of moving tectonic plates. But as with most political debates, there are a lot of ax grinding, lobbying and special pleading in progress. Universities want to reverse the deterioration of the candidates for computer courses. Gaming companies want more programmers. The government wants more high-tech start-ups. Manufacturers want students who can design embedded systems. And directors for increased funding for computer labs more. And so on.

What is missing in all this is a great vision. So here's my chance by:

primary school, children of all backgrounds and all parts of the UK should have the opportunity to: discover some of the key ideas of computer science to understand the thinking computer, learn to program, and have the opportunity to advance to the next level of excellence in these activities.

We will

why this is important and necessary in a moment, but first we must face a painful fact. Does almost everything that we did in the past two decades in the field of ICT education in British schools was wrong and largely useless. Instead of

educate

children about the revolutionary technology of their young lives, we focused on

• training
• to use software products obsolete. And we did because we fell into what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a "category mistake" - an error in the things of a type are presented as if they belonged to another. We made the mistake of thinking that computer learning is like learning to drive a car, and from a knowledge of the internal combustion technology is not essential to become an experienced driver, it follows that an understanding of how computers were not important for our children. The climax of the coronation of this error is a category vaunted "skill" called European driving license.
What he forgot is that the cars do not run the world, monitoring our communications, the power of our mobile phones, manage our bank accounts, keeping our daily mediation social relationships, browse our social activities and, in some countries - to have our votes. But networked computers to do all these things and much more.

So we have to admit that "ICT in schools" has become a toxic brand. We must replace it with a subject that is relevant, intellectually maintain and improve the lives of students. A lack of a better name, call it the computer. This is a generic term that covers two distinct areas. First, a set of key concepts that are essential for students to understand the networked world in which they grow. Second, the computer requires a different way of thinking about problem solving: it is called computational thinking, and try to understand the difference between human intelligence and artificial, and to think recursively, be aware of the need to prevention, detection and protection against risks, using abstraction and decomposition of the fight against the major tasks and the implementation of heuristic reasoning, the iteration and the search for solutions to complex problems.

There will be lots of interesting discussions on the key concepts students need to understand, but here is a list of potential to start. Children need to know: the mathematical algorithms (recipes that programs), cryptography (such as confidential information is protected on the network), artificial intelligence (such as services like YouTube, Netflix, Google and Amazon to predict their preferences), computational biology (how the genetic code), research (how we find needles in a haystack than a billion), recursion (a method in which the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem), and heuristics based on experience (technical problem solving, learning and discovery).

If these concepts seem mysterious to most readers, it is because we live in a culture that has always surprised by the ideas of generations. In this sense, CP Snow's "two cultures" are alive and well and living in the United Kingdom. And if you think you are too sophisticated to be taught to young children, whereas it is because you have never seen talented and imaginative teacher to work there. In fact, many readers in the UK in 30 years has been exposed to the recurrence, for example, because once upon a time in schools in the UK many teach Logo programming, which allows children to a turtle learn the mechanics may be responsible for conducting complex maneuvers. But in the end most schools teaching the logo and leave it back to training children to use Microsoft Word.