The other day, I was on a Skype call with a school in Canada and the principal reminded me about a blog I wrote 15 months ago on coding in our schools. You see, he is a Star Trek fan and commented on what I call the "Wesley Crusher Syndrome."
(For those of you who are not "Trekkies," Wesley Crusher was the teen super genius of the Star Trek The Next Generation series. He had grown up on a star ship and knew everything there was to know about advanced physics, computers, etc. He could solve any problem that he was presented with and it seemed that he got this skills through osmosis by just living in the environment.)
As I said in my blog post back then, My colleagues from the 80's and I thought that digital natives, you know the kids growing up in this Internet of Things driven world, would be just like Wesley Crusher, mystically knowing how to think, act, problem solve and be creators of information instead of just consumers. All of this by just living in the environment without being having to be taught how to do it! As I said in my blog post then, and repeat now, boy were we wrong.
Fast forward to today, thirty years later, and it would seem that we have schools trying to fix this problem by including coding in the K-12 curriculum. When ever I am brought in to consult, I always ask the school why do they want to include coding?
Now, don't misunderstand me. My first degree was in Computer Science and I made a nice extra "chunk-o-change" as one of the few living COBOL programmers left during the Y2K (Year 2000) meltdown of the business world, fixing old, poorly written code. I really do think that every single person should be able to code!! But the question is WHY I think that!
My answer is that I believe coding is the practical expression - the "tool" if you will - of a much bigger idea. What is that bigger idea? Well, simply put, it is the ability to figure out how to solve problems. It is a way to address an open-ended puzzle. It is a skill set that everyone should have, from the most introductory grade level through to adults living in the "real world!"
Now, coding itself can be a great platform to teach this skill. After all, we live in a world where need to be able to interact with the technology that seems to drive our existence, and being able to code makes it easier to be creators of content and not just consumers. Places like China, Australia and the UK are re-tooling their whole educational systems to force coding - or more appropriately - the concept of Computational Thinking and Design through coding.
Coding is not the only vehicle for this though.
STEM/STEAM (see my blog post here) can be another great vector for learning Computational Thinking and Design. I happen to be very fond of this model.
Project Based Learning is yet another example, of which I am also very excited to endorse, that can use the power of Computational Thinking and Design. (see this blog post for references on PBL)
CIJE (www.thecije.org) has a great program that utilizes Computational Thinking and Design - the CIJE High School Engineering Initiative. This two year course of studies (this is a UC accredited science program) teaches the basic skills of engineering, bio-mechanics and computer programming with the goal of being able to create a yearly capstone project that answers or resolves a real-world problem. What I think is wonderful is that CIJE is currently working on bringing this concept into the K-8 world.
So you see, when the school can answer the "WHY" do coding, then they can create a program that can really change the face of education, and really affect the ability of our kids to become creators of content and not just consumers.
Ensign Wesley Crusher would be proud.
As always, I solicit your thoughts on the blog site.
Yossie
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