Pando is reporting that the British Government is about to mandate a programming curriculum in all primary and secondary schools in UK by September this year.
They had initially scrapped the traditional Information and Communication Technologies curriculum almost two years ago. The plan is that the government is going to put in some money into this project and get some support from Google and the British Computer Society. The British Computer society is undergoing the work of of teaching the teachers that are going to be teaching programming in the schools. It was noted that many of the teachers have never written a line of code before.
If a 12 year old is already writing codes and selling apps on Apple Store, how easy would it be for a teacher who only know how computer works but have never written a line of code before?
Nick D’Aloisio an Australian-Born British Entrepreneur has been coding since a very young age; he got venture capital funding at the age of 15. In 2013, Summly an app he created for the iPhone was acquired by Yahoo for 30 millioon USD. The app has now been remade and christened Yahoo Digest. Many young ones who have access to computer at home and/or in school are teaching themselves how to code using tutorials that can be found online and other online teaching sites like codeacademy.com.
Coming home to Nigeria, what we’ll find is that our curriculum is so old that many computer science majors in universities can not write computer programs except for those who have been able to go teach themselves how to write programs. We also have those who have started to hang out in paces like Co-creation Hub to improve their proficiency in writing codes.
If advanced countries are trying to introduce computer programing in primary and secondary schools, shouldn’t we at least ensure that Computer Science Major students in our tertiary institutions are capable of writing computer programs and using up to date programming languages?
I think this is a matter of urgency; the innovations of tomorrow are going to be driven by computer programs and we need to groom homegrown computer programmers too in Nigeria.
