Skate Where the Puck’s Going, Not Where it’s Been

August 30, 2011
Michael Hayes
Michael Hayes

Co-Founder of RookieOven and Add Jam

Last Friday Eric Schmidt gave a speech at the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. In his speech he called out Computer Science education (and wider education) in UK schools. His speech highlighted that computing teaching in the UK is all about how to ‘use’ and not how to ‘make’ in regards to software and I whole heartidly agree. I feel I’m in a good position to pass comment on the subject, I left school in the recent past and have developed several pieces of software aimed at pupils and in doing so worked closely with pupils and educators in Scotland.

When I look back at my time in High School (ok I’ll admit it was a wee while ago now) the computing teaching was all about how to use the (Microsoft) software with the rare high level discussion on the principles and techniques of making software. My computing teacher in high school was fantastic, one of the teachers who would round out his teaching and teach you how to be successful in the wider world not just in his classroom but at the end of the day he was tied to a syllabus that was horrendously irrelevant to the technology industry.

As I pointed out in my guest post on The Social Penguin Blog back in June and as Eric Schmidt highlighted in his talk last Friday Scotland has a fantastic history of great thinkers and innovators but today pupils are being taught to be consumers of technology not innovators. Thats not to say there aren’t talented young people who are in high school, or indeed primary, who are eager to learn and create.

In all the talk about Steve Jobs in the past few days a reference Mr. Jobs made to a famous quote by Wayne Gretzky jumped out at me:

“I skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been”

The educators need to think where the puck is going and think quick because in technology the puck is moving faster than in any other subject area or industry. I wonder how mobile, social, local, scalability, analytics, SEO and the many languages, frameworks and technologies widely in use on the web today are featured in the current computing syllabus.

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