Is Coding Our Children's Champion?

Digital skills are going to be as important as reading and writing in the future. But does that actually mean we’re all to become coders?

Digital skills will make or break the UK – this was the conclusion when the Lords Select Committee issued its report. Thirty-five per cent of UK jobs could be lost over the next 20 years, the report speculated last month, as millions of jobs risk becoming automated. Digital literacy should become a core subject in school, concluded the committee, in order to make sure children leave education readily equipped for the job opportunities that will be there for them in the future.

“Our approach to educating people of all ages needs a radical re-think,” commented committee chair Baroness Morgan. “From an early age, we need to give digital literacy as much importance as numeracy and literacy.”. The report concluded that digital inclusion is potentially worth £63 billion a year to UK gross domestic product. “This report is a wake-up call. […] Digital digital skills [are] now seen as vital life [employment] skills.”.
But does teaching digital skills really mean everybody has to learn how to code? Coding pops up several times in the committee report as a buzzword that children should at least be familiar with. But ultimately “digital skills” is simply defined in the report as “the skills needed to interact with digital technologies”. While there’s logic to saying people will need to have some rudimentary understanding of how technology works, being a coder is a specialist job. Is it reasonable to say that we all need to know how to do that job?
This could be the call for us all to have “digital skills”. It more resembles how most people are familiar with first aid, but we don’t all have to be surgeons. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said at November’s ‘Every Second Counts Forum’: “Being able to code means that you understand what people can do with a computer. […] We need more people in parliament who can code, not because we need them to spend their time coding but because they have got to understand how powerful a weapon it is, so that they can make laws that require people to code to make machines behave in different ways.”.
In other words, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
So while Berners-Lee doesn’t actually want all of us writing hours of code every day, what he does want is for more appreciation of how the technology works. This means putting it in the national curriculum,  nurturing those with a strong interest and aptitude, and giving them the tools they need to learn to use it at a professional level. Berners-Lee believes that the younger we get kids into technology the better: “We need to introduce people to coding early so that the people to whom it appeals can then get as much time to do it as they need and really excel,” he said. “We need more people to have done coding to actually end up doing it for a living.”.
Berners-Lee’s dream has started to gain some traction. Last year’s changes to the English national curriculum have taken some tentative steps towards bringing coding to the classroom, but businesses are also starting their own initiatives. Barclays Code Playground offers two-hour coding sessions to kids aged 7-17 in selected branches, while Aardman Animations, the creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, ran a contest encouraging kids to programme their own games. The BBC has incorporated coding into programming from BBC Children and BBC Learning, including “Appsolute Genius” on CBBC where viewers are challenged to build their very own game app.
While there is a consensus that being tech-savvy is becoming a necessity for entry into most industries, there are also voices claiming that this constant focus on teaching coding might be missing the point. One detractor, Chris Granger, co-founder and CEO of Kodowa (known for its code editor programme ‘Light Table’) says “Despite the good intentions behind the movement to get people to code, both the basic premise and approach are flawed. The movement sits on the idea that ‘coding is the new literacy’, but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is. ”
Instead of coding, it’s actually modelling that’s the new literacy, Granger wrote in ‘Quartz’. “In the same way that composition and comprehension are not tied to paper, modelling is not tied to computers,” he enthused. “It can be both physical and mental. It takes place on paper and in Excel or with Lego and balsa wood airplanes. It is an incredibly powerful skill, which we can make even greater use of by transposing our models to computers.”.
One of the concerns of the report from the Lords Select Committee is that today’s computer teachers often don’t have the training needed to teach kids the digital skills they need for the jobs of the future.
If Granger is right – that coding is to digital skills as paper is to comprehension – it may take a while longer to work out how to best teach these skills to kids.