I have spent the past two years teaching a lot of young people around Bath and Bristol the beauty of programming. Ultimately it was unsustainable and under valued so I’ve kinda been forced to move to London, which leaves many of my students now unsupported. London (and other areas) are doing things to inspire the next generation into computing, Bath and Bristol should also start caring if they value their status as the second biggest technology cluster outside of London.
I have spent the past two years in Bath running activities to inspire the next generation into computer science. As I am moving on to London, I thought it would be good to reflect upon the contributions I’ve made, why they were important, and things that local organisations and people should start doing to help.
What I’ve accomplished so far
let’s start with my personal highlights :
- I setup digital makers at Hayesfield Girls School, an optional after school club for students which saw over 50 girls turn up over the two years!
- Mentored a team of girls from Oldfield Secondary School who won the technical challenge at Bath University’s App Championship against 8 other teams which included private schools
- Temporarily covered running two junior clubs at St Stephen’s School for around 40 kids
- Became a lecturer at Bath College teaching my own Android module to second year BSc Applied Computing students which is credited through Bath University
- Ran two separate hack days with a combined participation of 50
- Guest speaker at schools future days to speak about the different aspects of computer science
We also participated in other people’s events, as that’s super important to learn how other people do things and improve ourselves, and find other interested people:
- Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution Heritage Day and outreach workshops (which won the STEMnet award)
- Supported the Bath contingent of the BCS’s App-a-thon at the University of Bath
- Ran a hooked on invention workshop using littleBits at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University
- Mentored a group from Bath for the Festival of Code
Finally, I’ve also been invited to speak at a couple of places over the past 18 months in regards to what doing teaching kids to code. I also raise awareness of my teaching when I speak in a more technical capacity too!
Why was that super important?
There are literally endless amounts of articles already explaining that we need more people to enter tech, especially girls. The Mayor of London recently published that the UK economy will need 745,000 additional digital skilled workers in the next two years. But where are those people coming from? The numbers studying it at GCSE, A-level and higher aren’t really increasing.
Organisations like Code Club are doing a brilliant job of inspiring little kids into tech, however their support completely drops out for kids as soon as they enter secondary educations. Which is leading kids to feel let down with the support in tech when it matters most, the time that when their thinking about possible future career decisions. I was one of the only people in the area doing anything at all for secondary age students.
In addition, the way I teach is very different to how either the curriculum or many organisations are currently teaching tech. I don’t want to teach how to use specific programs like App Inventor, or be able to just recite lines of code blindly; instead we teach how to actually apply skills and solve their own problems.
My most popular workshop show students how to build their own emojis using SVG (uses XML which leads them nicely on to HTML) and making them interactive with JavaScript. To begin we give students the code for a piece of paper and a circle. They then have to create more circles for eyes and begin to experiment with other shapes to actually make something!
Without knowing at first, my workshops also connect with hacker ethics - “You can create art and beauty on a computer”, which are significant for me. This is important to raise as most kids don’t realise programming is actually creative, and if we want to encourage girls this is where we need to connect with them!
Why was I super important?
Aside from actually being one of the only people out there doing this, I was a lot more important than maybe other people realised (people who know me know I’m not big headed really!).
Firstly, there are very few visible technical female role models that kids really know about or can interact with. I’ve been told by one parent, that we really don’t need more middle aged men teaching technology as they’re not really helping inspire anyone.
I even ended up in a hilarious meeting with a person from Invest in Bristol and Bath who wanted me to meet a company looking to move from London but wanted to diversify their engineering team (read: hire more women). I did my bit explaining what I was doing, that it wasn’t a short quick fix, but over the long term we’ll win. You’d think this would mean Invest in Bristol and Bath would be interested in what I was doing? Maybe even try to help? Nope. They haven’t spoken a single word since, not even to find out how the meeting went or to thank me for giving up my time for them!
I am also very unique in that I have technical and teaching interests. In the year I graduated (2013) only two computer science graduates went into teaching. Two for all the schools in the country! It’s even more fun to go back and look at the gender ratios of those graduating with degrees in Computer Science to see how really, very important I am to the kids that I’ve been teaching!
I also really love the technical side of my job, my love for it is the reason I’d like to show more people and that maybe, they too could love it also. However, I’ve faced a lot of unnecessary negative sexism to get here. I was told by a global software consultancy that girls couldn’t code and was put in HR for the duration of my industrial placement. I was then consequently bullied by my University peers. One of only ways I feel I can make this anyway better is to ensure that more girls come through (making us less of a novelty) and to make sure they have each others support and mine.
This means I try to show real interest for my students, which I guess is what most teachers aspire to do but get held down with everything else a real teacher has to do. Even whilst leaving I’m looking at what I can do to keep most of the students I’ve taught interested, and open another door for dialog (watch this space!).
Finally, I’m young which means students can more easily relate to me. I did GCSE’s and A-Levels similarly to them, my journey isn’t totally dissimilar to theirs. I can give them more real advice than their parents or other teacher. I also end up at really cool events, like speaking at Droidcon NYC, or programming drones at Facebook. I ran my own hackday to show the kids that tech events are fun, and that there’s usually free pizza (and alcohol when they’re old enough!).
Why I’m sad to be leaving
I have spent a lot of effort (and money) encouraging kids here and feel like we’re finally breaking through! Our clubs are becoming more popular, more people know about our own events, we’re being asked to run workshops at other events.
Initially, I started off by only losing 20% of my wage (for not working one day a week) whilst teaching, which as a recent graduate and lower than average industry wages in the area was painful. However, after April I lost my job I could not find a single employer who would allow me to work 4 days a week (at a significant wage cut from the average) and offer me any career growth.
Which has meant I have spent the last 8 months technically unemployed. Barely making ends meet with the last of my savings, it appeared that teaching kids here technical skills was not valued. I spoke to Ben Howlett (our local MP) about it at the BRLSI open heritage day. He said he understood how it feels to be a broke graduate in Bath. Except that’s not really fair, I have a degree in Computer Science, I could be earning the big money literally anywhere else!
This makes me sad because I’m leaving Bath with a significant amount of debt. I’ll be fine in due course, but I’m scared about how I’ll be able to put a deposit and make the first months rent in London. Which I don’t think is really very fair.
I’m also sad because I know a lot of the things I’ve started will now stall and probably not continue because there isn’t anyone to take them over. John will take on as much as he can, but it’s not really fair on him (or his family) to take on teaching an entire city to appreciate technology! But, I don’t see anyone else stepping forward.
Schools often run careers days, where professionals volunteer to speak about their jobs in attempt to inspire. Most schools have no issue encouraging engineers in, however neither of the schools I’ve taught at can get a computing professional to speak. I was a good role model to these kids, I just couldn’t do it completely unsupported.
Why my future will be happier… eventually
I start a new job in London with a good company. During the interview process they tried to understand more of who I was, rather than whether I knew what a specific technical word meant.
The fact I’d spent the past two years teaching was an apparent advantage to my skill set! Everything I’d been doing was valued rather than being seen as a handicap! They’ve even offered me the potential to teach three hours a week (if I want) but I don’t want to push my luck. I want to focus on my future for a bit.
I’m looking forward to connect with other organisations already teaching programming in London. Learning from their successes, helping them do more better in future too! It will be a nice change to have others to collaborate with, rather than the stressy situation of being the sole organiser of an event.
In addition I’m looking forward to inviting some students from Bath up to really exciting events that I go to in London. Show them how it’s really done! I still believe if I could show the kids around technology offices like Facebook or Google it would seriously change their career decisions.
This will probably mean that companies in London will begin to look a lot more attractive to my students as they mature and graduate from whatever education they’re choosing. Which means that Bath and Bristol will miss out on the best talent.
It’s not just London actively supporting coding initiatives, places like the Media City UK are also supporting communities running technology things. It seems utterly crazy to me that Bath or Bristol aren’t doing anything, you’d think they’d want to retain their title of the second biggest technology cluster after London… but if all their companies can’t hire sufficient staff, they’re not going to last that long!
The irony being here and finishing this article, that the people who get this far already *know* that there is a big problem and more needs to be done. And those who could have actually helped probably won’t have read this.
