Kids today need a licence to tinker

Forget the old approach of the national curriculum, we need to open young minds to the creative possibilities of computing

Back to school time and millions of British kids are heading back to classrooms to embark on the national curriculum so beloved of busybody ministers. One item in particular on that curriculum will bemuse the youngsters. It goes by the initials ICT, short for information and communication technology. If they are in primary school, they will have to get through key stages 1 and 2. Secondary pupils have to get through stages 3 and 4 which, the soon-to-be-abolished Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency tells us, "have been developed to enable schools to raise standards and help all their learners meet the challenges of life in our fast-changing world". Michael Gove, the government's education supremo, has set in train a root-and-branch overhaul of the national curriculum, but for the time being our kids are stuck with the current version.

Reading through it, one is struck by its quaint, well-intentioned style. The key ICT concepts at stage 3, for example, are "capability", "communication and collaboration", "exploring ideas and manipulating information", as well as "the impact of technology" and "critical evaluation". Drilling down from these broad headings, one finds that, say, "communication and collaboration" involves getting pupils to explore "the ways that ICT can be used to communicate, collaborate and share ideas on a global scale, allowing people to work together in new ways and changing the way in which knowledge is created". All of which is fine and dandy, but some conceptual distance away from the use of BlackBerry Messenger to coordinate looting.

What do you do if you're a teacher of this stuff? Easy: you reach for some pre-cooked lesson plans. Here's a nice set (available in booklet, CD or download formats) for £25. One of the lessons in the package "familiarises students with some of the screen messages they may encounter in Word and teaches them appropriate responses".

Another takes students through converting their paper-based designs for data entry forms and invoices into "the real thing", using "a spreadsheet program". Guess which spreadsheet program? If you answered Microsoft Excel, go to the top of the class, because that's what the vast majority of British schools have.

What is happening is that the national curriculum's worthy aspirations to educate pupils about ICT are transmuted at the chalkface into teaching kids to use Microsoft software. Our children are mostly getting ICT training rather than ICT education.

And if you can't see the difference, try this simple thought-experiment: replace "ICT" with "sex" and see which you'd prefer in that context: education or training?

How we got to this ridiculous state of affairs is a long story. It's partly about how education departments, like generals, are always preparing for the last war. Thus, while we're moving into a post-PC age, our ICT curriculum is firmly rooted in the desktop computer running Microsoft Windows. It's also partly about the technophobia of teachers, local councillors and officials. But it's mainly about the chronic mismatch between the glacial pace of curriculum change in a print-based culture, and the rate of change in the technology.

There might have been a time when computers and networking were so exotic that ICT deserved a special roped-off space in the curriculum. But those days are long gone. Retaining it nowadays as a discrete subject is as absurd as it would be to have "books" as a special component of the national curriculum – a point nicely made by the educational research group Alt-C in its recent submission to Michael Gove.

For complicated reasons, therefore, our ICT curriculum has become dysfunctional. This raises two questions: does it matter? And what might we do about it?

The answer to the first question is simple: it really does matter. The current curriculum undermines the authority of the education system by revealing to tech-savvy children how antediluvian it is.

But, more importantly, the curriculum is disabling rather than enabling for most kids, because it is preparing them for a technological world that is vanishing before their eyes. Training children to use Microsoft Office is the contemporary equivalent of the touch-typing courses that secretarial colleges used to run for girls in the 1940s and 1950s – useful for a limited role in the workplace, perhaps, but not much good for life in the modern world.

The worse thing about the ICT curriculum, however, is its implicit assumption about our relationship to the technology. "Look," it says seductively, "using a computer is like driving a car: you don't need to know how the thing works – you just need to know how to drive it."

Of course, this is, broadly speaking, true for cars, because few of us are going to go into the car-making (or even car-repairing) business. But computers are not like cars. They are machines driven by software, and software is pure "thought-stuff", in other words, something that is accessible to anyone with the requisite curiosity, intelligence and talent. So while teenagers might not be able to make cars, they can certainly get into the software business, because the entry barrier is so low. All you need is imagination, talent, time and persistence. But it really helps if you're schooled in an environment that encourages tinkering and experimentation, rather than one which just preaches utilitarian use of information appliances with "no user-serviceable parts", as the saying goes.

As it happens, Britain knows more about this than most countries because in the 1980s it witnessed an explosion of creativity unleashed by a philosophy that was the polar opposite of the spirit underpinning the national curriculum. At the core of the phenomenon was a small home computer – the BBC Micro – launched as part of a nationwide campaign by the national broadcaster to awaken interest in the possibilities of computing in school and the home.

The BBC machine was made by Acorn, a Cambridge-based start-up, and it was an open-architecture, extensible machine based on the MOS 6502 processor that powered the Apple II (among other devices). The story of the BBC Micro has been beautifully told by the writer Francis Spufford in his book Backroom Boys (Faber, 2003).

The machine came with no software other than its built-in operating system and a Basic interpreter. In order to make it do anything, you had to write a program. However, because it came with the imprimatur of the BBC, it found its way into many homes and most schools and universities, where it had an astonishing impact. I've lost count of the number of successful computer and software engineers I've met who attributed their choice of career to getting their hands on a BBC machine when they were teenagers.

In addition to launching a thousand careers, the little machine spawned two significant industrial developments. The first was computer gaming, a business in which Britain still punches way above its weight. The seed from which that grew was Elite, an astonishing 3D game created for the BBC Micro by two Cambridge undergraduates, David Braben and Ian Bell. They were fed up with the naff, packaged gaming products then available for the machine, so they wrote their own – and changed the world. The second was ARM, a world-beating semiconductor and software giant which morphed out of Acorn, the company that built the BBC Micro.

ARM's chip designs are the processors that power most of the world's smartphones and many of its portable computing devices. But what's really intriguing is that this remote descendant of the BBC Micro is also one of the forces powering a movement that's sprung up to resist the utilitarian, no-tinkering philosophy of the national curriculum.

This autumn, for example, we will see the first production prototypes of a fully operational Linux computer the size of a credit card. It's a creation of Raspberry Pi, a charitable foundation set up by a gifted Cambridge-based engineer, Eben Upton. Earlier this month, the first (alpha) prototypes of the device were unveiled. As with most first-draft hardware devices, it's physically bigger than the eventual product will be, but the technology works. At one end is a USB port for a keyboard or other input device; at the other is an HDMI port to hook up to a domestic television – just like the BBC Micro of old. The aim is to make a powerful little computer that will cost around £15 (and is therefore cheap enough to give to every child), run sophisticated software such as Firefox and yet be completely programmable so that kids who want to write code for it will be able to do so. But the best thing about the Raspberry Pi is that the processor that powers it is made by ARM. And one of the trustees of the foundation that has created it is David Braben, one of the two teenage hackers who created Elite all those years ago.

A key driver of this new tech resistance movement is a desire to rescue kids from the fate that the Department of Education has in mind for them, namely as passive consumers of information appliances and services created by giant foreign corporations. Where governments dream up projects like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), the resistance seeks to grant kids a "Licence to Tinker" – to demystify the technology by providing tools and ideas that enable them to understand how modern networked devices work.

Cue Arduino, a fascinating Italian-based project that has created an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

Arduino kit is aimed at anyone who is interested in creating interactive objects or environments. It can monitor its environment by receiving input from sensors, and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The project has its own programming language and its own development environment – both of which are free. Devices built with Arduino boards can be stand-alone or can communicate with software running on "ordinary" computers. And like the predecessors of the BBC Micro, Arduino stuff can be built by hand or purchased preassembled. It's like a chemistry set for geeks, complete with mind-blowing explosives.

What the tech resistance movement shows is that there is an alternative to the national curriculum in ICT. Instead of laying the dead hand of key stages 1-4 on our children, we could be opening their minds to the disruptive and creative possibilities of computing and networking, reversing the decline in entrants to computer science departments and – who knows? – even seeding the development of the ARMs of the future.

The only question is whether Michael Gove is up for it? Sadly, you only have to ask the question to know the answer.

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