At the end of last year I became the stepfather to a 9 year old boy.
Obviously, this comes with far more responsibility than I’d like – particularly as the UK ploughs an ongoing path into economic gloom. It all makes me concerned about the world he’s growing up in, and whether he’ll have the right education to get a meaningful career and support a family of his own one day.
So, when it came to making New Year’s resolutions, I thought I’d try to get a bit more engaged in his education and schoolwork and help out where I could – just to at least make sure that he’s on the right path to flourishing in future.
Obviously, with a personal and professional interest in digital and a growing boy who’d happily spend every hour of the day on Minecraft, Roblox or (the soon to be late lamented, at least in my house) Lego Universe, I thought I’d look into how he’s being taught computer studies – or ICT as they insist on calling it these days.
And I was horrified.
When I was my son’s age, I lived through what now seems like a golden age of home computing.
The government was subsidising BBC Micros in classrooms, after-school computer clubs were teaching basic programming (literally), and in our homes a generation of machines from now fallen giants like Commodore and Sinclair were encouraging us to go hands on and code our own programmes.
Now, however, it seems that ICT isn’t about computer programming or computer science – it’s simply about using common computer tools: in other words, learning how to use Microsoft Office.
Clearly, for an economic future where video games are the new Hollywood and the best use of a garage is launching a start-up rather than rehearsing a band, young people need to develop the skills to be active creators of technology – not simply passive players and consumers.
So, I set about trying to find the best way to teach a 9 year old about coding and the best I could find was the excellent Scratch from MIT. That was when Twitter came to my rescue, in the form of tweets from all my New York friends name-checking Codecademy.
If you haven’t come across it, Codecademy offers a series of fun and engaging interactive online tutorials in Javascript (with Python and Ruby looking set to follow).
User numbers had been growing across the US over last year, receiving a huge boost from New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (no slouch when it comes to getting digital) tweeting in support of the company’s #CodeYear initiative and stating that he’d made the resolution to learn programming from Codecademy in 2012.
“Brilliant,” I thought, “this is what my stepson needs”. After I signed up myself to check it out, it got me thinking and you know what? I’m not going to push it on a 9 year old just yet– I’m going to push it on you.
Odds are that if you’re reading this blog you almost certainly work some kind of digital marketing job, but increasingly (and this may not be you) there’s a generation of people in these roles who’ve never really known what lies beneath the hood of software, websites or apps.
Nevertheless, these people still feel they’re qualified to manage development projects and pontificate on digital issues just because they passively consume Facebook and own an iPhone.
To be honest, when it comes to understanding the nuts and bolts I’m not much better: my knowledge of Sinclair and BBC basic now counts for nothing, and the HTML and VB I learned when I started my first digital job in ’96 don’t add up to that much more in 2012, but at least I recognise this.
Obviously, I don’t believe that you can’t understand ‘digital’ if you don’t write code, but I do believe that a little experience of ‘making’, rather than simply ‘using’ can provide a valuable perspective on project work. And – if you’re a digital professional – the further you are away from these skills the closer you might be to irrelevance in the future.
So, if you have time to spare this year then make the resolution to join myself, the mayor of New York and more than half a million others on Codecademy.
It’s never going to make you a native, it might not even teach you how to write serious scripts let alone set you up for a lucrative second career as a coder, but at the very least it should give you an appreciation of what much of the real work in the digital industries really involves.
