How I would do the "Year of Code"

As a member of HP's Advanced Technology Group I'm very interested in government initiatives to get more people into various forms of computer programming.  The current one being talked about in the media is the "Year of Code", the director of this was attacked on Newsnight recently and it felt a little like she was hung out to dry by someone.

I think it is really great that there is an initiative for this, but I worry that we will end up going with the wrong approach that would collapse.  My head was spinning with ideas if I was writing a curriculum for this so I thought I would note them down in this blog post.

Computer Fundamentals

At first I would teach computer fundamentals to children.  You can't even begin to program a computer properly without understanding these.  The three main components of a computer haven't really changed in many years, very much like a car engine, they have just evolved.  By this I mean the CPU, RAM and storage.  The children should be taught these and the rolls they play in a computer.  Even buy an old PC (AMD K6 or early Pentium for example) and get the children to put it together as an exercise.

CPUs run instructions, at a basic level they can only see two numbers at a time and operate on them (yes it is way more complex than that, but we are teaching basic fundamentals here).  Lots of fun animations can be used to illustrate this if it is done properly.  Computer programming languages are compiled or interpreted into this machine language, children need to know this, CPUs don't understand English :)

They should be taught something relative for computer storage (both GB and GiB).  Children will often tell me "my X has Y GB of memory" but they often have no idea what this means they can store or even if that is RAM or flash storage.  What is "Windows" or even an "Operating System"?  This is something that should be taught as well as the alternatives such as "Mac OS" and "Linux" (maybe not teach them that how to use them, but at least that they exist).  Did you know that your Android phone/tablet is also a computer running a form of Linux?  When I gave a talk in a junior school not too long ago many didn't know this, I even showed them Fedora Linux running on my laptop.  The fascination was incredible.

What is dual/quad-core, what is a MHz?  These are all questions that could be answered by the fundamentals section of the curriculum.

At this stage you could teach them IT.  Word processing and spreadsheets haven't changed much since I was in high school in the 90s and I doubt they will change much in the next couple of decades.  We were taught Logo in school as an introduction to programming (I wouldn't call it a programming language but it helps give instructions in a logical order).  Today's equivalent is "Scratch" which would be an acceptable replacement.

The Internet

The Internet can be this big scary thing that will play a large part of their lives for some time to come.  Children should be taught how the Internet is connected together (they don't need to be taught underlying protocols).  They need to be taught not only that it can be unsafe but why/how it can be unsafe.  I believe there are already initiatives to do this in school but with the fundamentals base knowledge they should be able to understand easier what goes on when they request a web page.

Computer Programming

This should not be taught to everyone (beyond Scratch as indicated above).  Only those who show interest in the subject should be taught more advanced subjects.  I wouldn't teach how to play a clarinet to someone who isn't interested in music.  But by all means given children a taster to see if it is something they want to learn.

When I was around 7 years old I taught myself BASIC on a BBC Micro, it was also one of the first machines I learnt assembly language on (I'm not recommending teaching children that, but encourage them if they want to learn).  Although BASIC in that form is hard to find and probably not as relevant there are languages nowadays that could be taught instead.

Last month I was in our Seattle office and during my down time I spent some time with some friends there.  A young lady called Sakura lives there who is only a year older than my eldest son and was telling me all about how she is learning Python.  In my opinion this would be a great starter language.

Combined with a development board such as a Raspberry Pi, a hardware kit and a good Python library set the programming could be extended to basic robotics.  Seeing their work do tangible things in the real world would be a great way of keeping children interested.

HTML is not a programming language.  XML is not a programming language, with any hope XML will be replaced with YAML in the future but that is another blog post.  These two should not be taught in schools but any inquisitive child should be shown things like the w3c schools site.

Summary

We need more computer programmers in the UK.  When I worked as a Technical Lead for HP Cloud's Platform-as-a-Service department I was the only one in the entire department who was UK based, I would have loved to have hired more UK staff.  But not everyone will be / can be a programmer and we should accept this.  We definitely need more IT professionals in the UK, from people who can use word processors and the Internet to people who can program.  The UK seems focused on games programming, negating the fact that there are many other fun things you can do in the computer industry.  When I was 18 and working in a computer shop building and repairing PCs, that was a lot of fun and very hands-on.  Now I find debugging and writing Open Source C tools/libraries a lot of fun and incorporate that in my day job as much as I can.

I do hope the government gets this right and teaches appropriate things whilst keeping it fun and interesting for the children.

These are just my opinions and not necessarily those of HP, please comment with what you think the "Year of Code" initiative should look like.