We need new techies

The recent Guardian article by Tom Watson on why MPs need to play videogames to understand them got me thinking. If you haven't already read the article, go read it then come back.

Done? Good. This sparked a conversation on a messageboard I visit, specifically regarding the comment that kids aren't taught programming any more, they're taught Office. This is sadly very true, and something that led me to another realisation – at one point, kids *were* taught programming, but not by their school.

I can only speak from a British perspective on this, so if you're an American reader, a little history – while you had your Apples and your Microsofts and your IBMs fighting a war for the computer industry, over here we had a very different situation, almost a microcosm, with players like Sinclair and Acorn competing on scale and price. The BBC eventually funded an initiative to get a computer into every school in the country, with the idea that they would bleed into homes, and so with Acorn they created the BBC Micro. This in turn created a generation of coders and tinkerers – a boom of homegrown software, written entirely by teenagers in their bedrooms after school, that in many cases would go on to sell thousands or even millions of copies through small ads. The computer giants of the time found it almost impossible to market to these kids, who weren't interested in buying business software or games created by a man in a suit, when they could very easily code their own entertainment.

I was born in the midst of all of this, and managed to catch the tail end of this revolution in my early childhood, being given a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ with a whopping 48K of memory and a tape player for I think my sixth birthday. I was quite definitely the exception – this was around 1990, when kids my age didn't have a computer – older siblings might have had one, but no interest in sharing it, and if my classmates had a computer of any kind it was a NES or Sega Master System. And this came to shape the generation I grew up with – instead of a generation who could program, diagnose and disassemble a system, we replaced it with a generation who knew only how to slap in a cartridge and flick the On switch.

So now we've reached the stage Tom Watson speaks of, where kids are taught Microsoft Office and nothing else. As such all but the nerdiest of today's children have no idea how to fix a computer or even how to do anything with a computer that does something even slightly unexpected – I see in people my own age the same bewilderment and utter powerlessness when confronted with a technically-worded error message that I've come to expect from my parents' generation. Those slightly older than I, on the other hand – let's say late twenties to mid-thirties – are typically very technically literate people, because they were of the BBC Micro era. An era where you didn't nag your parents for the money to buy the latest Call of Duty, you sat down with a programming manual in front of a portable TV and started bashing out BASIC. And then invariably debugging it.

This first became evident to me when I reached sixth form, and for the first time my ICT class entered the subject of programming. It hadn't been covered at all during GCSE years – all we got was word processing and spreadsheets then. I found myself as an AS-Level student miles ahead of the rest of my class in what I thought to be an easy subject – Visual Basic 5. I often found myself being chided by the teacher for not doing work, when he caught me idly faffing about with colours or window properties instead of the task at hand, not because I was being troublesome, but because I'd already done the work and was occupying myself while everyone else was still trying to grasp the code. I'm not saying this because I believe I was any more intelligent than my classmates, but I do attribute it to having caught the tail end of the BBC generation – I'd taught myself programming at a very young age, and they hadn't. The concepts being taught were far from new to me.

I wasn't the only one, of course – in the first couple of years of secondary school I met a couple of kindred spirits, other hangovers from the 1980s, who every single breaktime without fail were to be found huddled around the three BBC Model B computers in the library, sharing games on floppy disk while everyone else was reading books or outside playing games. But we were very much the minority, even though if we'd been born just a few years earlier there'd have been a queue to use those machines.

The people I grew up with certainly own more technology than those before, whether it's laptops, smartphones, iPods and so on. Having worked on a computer helpdesk for two years drove home to me that I was different in my understanding of computers. They were contacting me for advice on trivial problems I'd learned the answers to decades ago, or could very easily solve using some knowledge I'd gleaned along the way. Even in the workplace there was a marked difference between people my age and younger, who had only the most basic understanding of how to operate a computer and usually needed a flowchart to diagnose an actual fault, and those a little older: the turbonerds, the ones who used linux, the ones with homebrew games consoles. In short, the ones raised in the golden age of BASIC.

So the solution seems obvious – bring back programming in school. Not in AS-Level ICT, where only a select few will benefit from it, but much earlier – ideally at primary school level. Get them fluent in Visual Basic early on, and start teaching C++ for A-Level. It's the only thing to do if we want a world where millions of hours aren't wasted in the workplace every year by staff having to call technical support on the most trifling of issues. Issues which are instantly understood and rectified by the BBC Micro generation.



2 Responses to “We need new techies”

1. Shinola says:

   14/11/2009 at 7:25 pm

   Instead they should put all the MOD funding into forming an elite corps of programmers formed from all the gormless soldier types. As a country we could do so much more good in the world with a force like that!
2. Paul Potter says:

   15/11/2009 at 2:33 pm

   A superb bit of blogging there. Spot on. I was brought up during that 8 bit era.