The Commodore 64 Spike
A Freakonomics-ish Theory of CS Education
In 1986, when I was 14 years old, I bought a C=64 of my very own. It took me a year of working a paper round after school to scrounge together the AU$400 needed to buy one from the local K-Mart. I desperately wanted one, even after spending years tinkering around with them at friends’ houses.
My new computer spent six months in limbo; my Dad wasn’t happy with me taking over the family TV in the living room, and so my Grandad eventually helped out by buying me a TV to connect it up to. While the computer remained in its box, I read the four programming books that came with it over and over again, and wrote Basic programs out on paper, ready to type them in the moment I hooked things up.
There’s a problem with Computer Science education. Our kids enter primary school absolutely fascinated with computers and technology; each and every one of them. And yet somehow, after twelve years in the school system, fewer and fewer of them opt to pursue a career in IT. In Australia, the number of students graduating University with Computer Science degrees has been dropping year after year since the turn of the century.
Things look even more grim for the girls. In 1984, a third of all Computer Science graduates were female. These days it’s something like 10%, making women rarer in IT departments than in Abbott’s cabinet. And yet IT is one of the highest-paid, most equitable career choices for women.
It is estimated that in five years time there will be three IT job openings for every single person with the necessary qualifications. And with the ever-growing predominance of technology, and the increasing importance of IT to our economy, the education gap is only going to increase. What can be done?
Back in the 80's, you could go to your local K-Mart and buy an affordable machine that taught young children how to become programmers. It even came with books that helped them to do just that. It was impossible for your kids to not be given the opportunity to get hooked by computers and programming. Every home seemed to have a device that dropped you straight into a programming environment when it was switched on.
But it was all a glorious accident. Parents didn’t intentionally train their kids for careers in IT. Its just that having a computer at home was the new thing, and primitive early home computers were simple, and thereby directly exposed a lot of their internal workings to the user. In much the same way, early motor vehicles would have made it easier for a car owner to learn how they worked and how to service them simply by tinkering around.
Imagine a group of Australian boys and girls during the summer holidays spending an entire day alternating between swimming in the pool and entering a dark bedroom, wrapped in towels and dripping wet, to research and document what happened to Ghost & Goblins when different values were “poked” into different memory locations. These kinds of things happened; I was there.
I have a theory. The big spike of interest in Computer Science in the 1990s was a direct result of kids growing up with these self-teaching devices in their homes, and the drop-off of interest in the 2000s was due to the increasing scarcity of such devices, as machines with graphical operating systems that hid the underlying workings became increasingly common, making it easier to just use computers without having to know much about how they work.
Think about it; if the peak period for C=64 ownership was from 1984 to 1987, then students entering University in 1995 grew up with one, and those entering University in 2005 didn’t.
When I entered University in 1991, the Engineering faculty was running an IT degree. It had a significantly higher entry threshold than the standard Engineering degrees; you had to be a better student to be accepted into the course (I didn’t make it, but transferred after my first year after demonstrating I had the chops). The degree was introduced in 1990, and was terminated in 1997 as interest waned. Coincidence?
Some countries are cottoning on to the problem sooner than others. Estonia was the first country in the world to mandate that computer programming should be part of the curriculum for public primary schools. Children in Vietnam learn computer science from first grade, and half of them could pass an interview at Google by the time they’re sixteen. And the UK is introducing a new curriculum next September that will see children as young as five being taught programming.
In Australia, proposed modifications to the K-12 curriculum are being considered, and Google Australia is lobbying hard for them to be accepted. But with a daughter already in the school system, I’m very aware that our primary school CS education stops with learning to use Word and PowerPoint, and that although times tables may be taught by playing “educational games” on computers, these are no more than high-tech equivalents of flash cards. It would be so much more valuable to learn how to write programs to display the times tables, and, from there, to explore numbers more deeply.
I’m determined to bridge the gap by getting hands-on with my daughter’s CS education myself. She’s already experienced the joy of poring over C=64 programming books and learning how to make things happen on screen by writing code, this time using an emulator on our iMac. And there’s so much more for her to discover if I can kindle the spark of enthusiasm.
So, what can be done? The short-term answer is, I think, for parents working in the IT industry to volunteer their time at schools, helping to give all children the opportunity to become fascinated with how computers work. And there needs to be an outlet for those of them who do get hooked; either in the form of technology they can use at home (let’s replace those lame LeapPad toy computers with the real thing), or in the form of extracurricular activities, such as after-school code clubs. I’m committed to making a real change to the education of all children at my daughter’s school. I’ll let you know how I get on.
