BeBettr Late Morning Session

Still struggling with WiFi but managing to soldier through!

Aral Balkan is not talking about mobile but is going to be doing some live coding (Yay!) and about teaching programming to kids. He’s just started his timer and he has 20 minutes. Here we go.

Are we creating a generation of programmers or a generation of secretaries? He doesn’t know, but her refers to the final speaker, Anna, who will also talk about this later.

The students are not getting the right exposure, they are learning about word, office, excel and powerpoint. These are office skills and secretarial skills. He describes this as boring and not something that he wants as his first exposure to ICT and computers. His visit to BETT confirmed this due to a plethora of deliver of Microsoft products. That vast majority of schools are using Windows and none are using Ubuntu or Linux based systems. No sight of OLPC either. He’s now showing a video from BETT. The speaker is talking about how ICT in classroom is product focused rather than creativity and communications and programming, which is what should be taught in the classroom. This would give a better ICT experience to kids in the classroom. Aral talks about bring digital literacy and creativity back in to the curriculum. But why weren’t there more open source solutions there? None of the people he spoke to said there was space for open source solutions. He’s back on to OLPC and that we don’t see many in the UK because they are aimed at third world countries, although, he says, that out approach to ICT learning could be considered as comparabale! We’re  back on to the subject of the way education values ICT and how they pay nothing to ICT teachers and therefore they won’t get the right kind of people to do the teaching in schools. I’ve now been confronted by Aral as a child on the lap of Elmo from Sesame Street!! Where did it all begin for him? His first experience for a computer in DOS (DOS prompt on screen!)…  His father gave him a computer and a manual and told him he couldn’t break it. He wanted games but there weren’t any, so he made them himself using BASIC. He demo’s 10 Print “hello” 20 goto 10, and Hello streams down the screen to the delight of the audience. Now he can’t stop it and it decends into chaos!! All fixed now His second attempt, also in BASIC, is more about games… He inputs some code and a dot appears on the screen. Then we graduate on to plotting lots of dots on the screen! Well it doesn’t as he’s getting errors. His coding must be a little rusty!! He makes a slight change to the syntax and now we see a screen of stars in different colours. This was magical to him as a child as he was on his way to creating games. It is important that we give kids access to creating this magic. So what can we do today to teach this to kids. The tools are better, we have graphical tools to teach programming (I think he’s using something called SCRATCH 1.4 on a mac). Bascially he’s showing us drag and drop programming which looks really cool (as a non programmer). I think my 8 year old would love this stuff!! He’s dragging different commands onto the stage that control a cat on the screen. Very cool! Lots of examples, you can see how kids would be totally engaged by this. Maybe not all but more that you might think. This is just one example and there are many others. Kids can now share these things where as he couldn’t so easily. Oopps, another tech fail! He can do this level of programming using java in a browser so no extra software is required. He’s demo’ing javascript code with a preview and you can see it straight away. His timer is up and he’s asking for an extra 5 minutes. His request has been granted by the BeBettr overlords!! You can see how even this level or Javascript could be taught in school. It’s very simple and it can be copied and shared to get kids excited and proud about and would give them some magic to show. In closing, if you want to empower a generation you have to give them technologies not proprietary software and show them how they can gain re-usable skills to create. These things don’t have to be expensive, the software, when opensource, can be free. Teach design and development, allow them to hack. Train the teachers so it trickles down to the students and pay the teacher what they are worth to teach. We have to power to create a new generation to instil them with a sense of awe and magic.

@aral on twitter.

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