Hello World

What is the state of computing education and where is it heading?

• Raspberry Pi Foundation • Season 6 • Episode 5

Share episode

Explore the current state of computing education and consider where it is heading next in this episode of the Hello World podcast.

James Robinson:

The subject matter and how to teach it, well that's a journey. We haven't finished that journey by any stretch of the imagination.

Niel Mclean:

A lot of us need to work out exactly what this thing is rather than rush in.

Sue Sentance:

We are in a phase of discovery about our subject.

James Robinson:

Welcome back to Hello World! The podcast for educators interested in computing and digital making. I'm James Robinson, long time computing educator.

Sway Grantham:

Hello! I'm sway Grantham a senior learning manager at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and former computing teacher and leader in the primary phase. I'm very excited to be here with James today tackling the big topic of where computing education as a discipline is heading. As ever we really value your comments and feedback, which you can share at helloworld.cc/podcastfeedback.

James Robinson:

This week as Sway said we are reflecting on the state of computing education. Where we are now? Where we've been? And where we might be heading? Here in England we saw a significant change a little over 10 years ago as computing was introduced to the curriculum. Sway from your perspective what are your reflections on this period? Where computing is now, and where do you think it might be heading?

Sway Grantham:

Oh I think like 10 years ago we were getting, we'd heard of this new subject called computing, and it was quite intimidating to a lot of teachers. I remember the first time I read it because there was so much discussion of the vocabulary, working with younger learners we had the introduction of the word"algorithm", and what that meant, and what that would look like. And a lot of new subject matter. There was a lot of old subject matter as well that was in the IT curriculum. But the thing we remember is all the new stuff that was added in as it became the subject of computing. I think at that point and, and the journey then for the next few years was the challenge of working with younger learners, especially. What does this look like for them? There'd been a lot of research about how to teach programming and introduce computing concepts with older learners and University age students. But with five year olds it was a, it was a lot to learn and a lot to explore there. And kind of where that journey's headed and where it's gone to, as we've just learnt so much about it. We now, we can debate pedagogy and different approaches and should we teach it this way or that way? We've thought about how much time needs to be spent in each area of computing. There was a time that we went really far one way where we did lots of programming, and networks, and less of using computers and digital skills. And I think that's on its way shifting back to a more balanced approach. Moving to now I think there's still a lot of challenges with consistency and high teacher turnover. Particularly in primary where there's often one teacher who is solely responsible for the subject of computing. And this can mean when they change roles or move on, that there's a void or a bit of a reset in the education landscape in that school. James you have more experience with older learners, do you have different experiences of how the last ten years have gone?

James Robinson:

I think I probably do to an extent, and I think for me it sort of goes back a little bit further to when there was lots of like, trying to kind of get computing onto the curriculum in a more substantial way. Or lots of sort of experimentation with, how we teach programming and trying to get kids engaged with programming whilst the curriculum didn't really allow for it. So I think a lot of our early push for computing kind of came all from the secondary end and particularly when we got the new GCSE's that sort of lead lots of those reforms. And I think what was really interesting is back then there was a real wild-west kind of sense to computing, like early doors there was lots of people trying all sorts of exciting ways of bringing computing into the classroom, trying stuff out. And I remember probably within a couple of years trying so many different sort of products, and platforms, and languages, and tools to see what stuck. And I think over the last 10 years or so the subject as a discipline has really matured in terms of our understanding of the subject matter and how to teach it. Now that's a journey, we haven't finished that journey by any stretch of the imagination, but I think we know now a lot more than we knew back then. But as you say I think you know, we still see the same kind of similar issues that teacher turnover and, and the resilience of computing within a school, within a school setting is really, you know can be a challenge. So yeah, that's that's my experience. I think it's a really exciting time. I think the erm, and maybe we'll get on to some of this later on today. But I think the introduction or the kind of the, the arrival of AI in a computing education landscape now has the potential to make us enter another kind of wild-west kind of phase where everything's being trialed and experimented with and not really, without really knowing what quite what we're doing. And so I think that's really interesting. I'm really conscious Sway that we're talking very much from a UK perspective and we could take this in all sorts of different directions. We could talk about computing all around the world, the impact of AI, and all sorts of things. And thankfully we've got two fantastic guests joining us today to help us do just that. I literally have no idea where the conversation is going to take us Sway but I think it's going to be really exciting. So joining us first of all today is Sue Sentance. Sue leads the Raspberry Pi Computing education Research Center at the University of Cambridge. She's worked in the field of computing education for around 25 years as a teacher teacher educator researcher and in various leadership roles. And she's got a particular interest in computing education around the world. So Sue, it's great to have you join us today. How are you?

Sue Sentance:

Good morning! Hello, James.

James Robinson:

So Sue how would you summarise the state of computing education around the world right now? And what are some of the successes we're seeing and some of the challenges? Just a nice simple questions start you off.

Sue Sentance:

Okay, well, let's start with the successes around the world. I think it's been a really exciting period if computing around the world in the last sort of 10 years or so. The pluses are you can definitely see that the subject is becoming incorporated in more and more curricular. And not just in the US, and Europe, or Australia, but also in Latin America, in parts of Africa, so this is fantastic. I think it's becoming more universally accepted that children need to learn computing or something computing related by governments as well as you know, schools and teachers. And I think another plus is that we are, we're also as you already said thinking about pedagogy as well as thinking about the subject. Though I think you know different countries are at different stages in that journey. On the sort of the challenges just like you both said around the situation here. There is a kind of a teacher crisis. You know we just don't have enough teachers to teach a new subject where, because there aren't so many teachers, there aren't qualifications for teachers, and teachers didn't learn it in school themselves. They, the parents of the teachers didn't learn computing in school. So this is going to be a little bit of an issue for quite a while and aligned to that is the fact that although you see government's understanding that computing is an important subject. They don't seem to get the fact that you can't learn as a teacher. You can't learn to teach computer science in six months. It takes years to learn to be confident teaching programming particularly. And then the other third thing I'd say is a challenge which we've already alluded to the wild-west of AI which I concur with. Is the fact that I think the subject is changing. All this talk back in 2014 about the principles of computer science the subject is the same it is now actually changing. Rule based programming, do we still need to teach rule based programming? What about data driven programming? Just as one example. So I think it's a bit of a rounded picture.

James Robinson:

That's really great, thank you. And Sway do you want to bring in our second guest?

Sway Grantham:

Yes adding to Sue's wealth of experience is Neil McLean head of education at BCS The Chartered Institute of IT. He has a wealth of experience, starting as a secondary school teacher, becoming a local authority advisor, and then leading to the creation of the first IT national curriculum. Since then he's worked with government and with educational research and currently alongside his work at BCS. He chairs The Learning Foundation and Digital Poverty Alliance working to bridge the digital divide. So I'm curious Niel in your opinion how equitable is computing education access in the UK?

Niel Mclean:

Not very, as a headline response to that. And there are really good reasons for all of this. There are things that you know when governments introduce a curriculum the things that a government assumes are in place. And partly it's Sue's point about the availability of teaching, and teachers, but it's also assuming for instance there's a shared definition of something, so that everybody's aiming in the same direction. I remember when I was involved in the early days of IT education it was then called. And said the great thing about IT is no one knows what it is, but everybody thinks it's a good thing. And globally that, you know, [...] I go into a variety of different places. I echo Sue's impression of enthusiasm. If you go behind that enthusiasm and that what's driving that enthusiasm you see in some cases it's an economic argument. It's about skilling up a workforce for the future. If you go in other places, it's an equity argument. So there are, there are different bases on which people are creating computing curricula. Then you know, when you, when you write a curriculum, if you didn't know what art was reading the art curriculum wouldn't help you understand what art was. It simply tells you which bits you have to teach yeah? So they assume that there is an underlying understanding of what the thing is. That is not equitably shared, in some places because of history there are people who have got a sense of what computing is in others there aren't so all they can do is teach the shopping list that's on whatever curriculum document they receive from wherever they receive it. There's obvious things about inequity in resources, but I tend to think resources things can be solved if there's a will. The stepping back to make sure that everybody's starting from a similar sort of point about what the subject is what it's there to do and what it means for different age groups in exactly the same way as a science teacher knows that a force is a push, or a pull, or a Twist. Not the differential of a scalar field when they're teaching eight-year-olds. The thing you described earlier Sway was teachers struggling their way to take things that are defined at one level and think now what does that actually mean when I'm talking about a five-year-old, a seven-year-old whatever. And it's more complex than simply extruding back from a higher education view of this. So I think there's an underlying difference in assumptions, what it's for. Which lead to assumptions about who it's for? This child will never become a programmer why should they leave it, teach it? And that's all exacerbated by a lack of equity about access to resources. And then the big one that Sue's talked about which is you know, there aren't the teachers everywhere with the grounding in this so they're following the recipe card.

James Robinson:

Cool. That's a really good answer. No, no, no you've both given really good answers and now I just need a moment to process to think about where we go next. I think there's something about this the idea like those sort of prerequisites those things that you, that are going to lead to success in like establishing computing as a subject and we've alluded to a couple of them like the resourcing, understanding what the subject is about, the capacity of the teachers, but and maybe even curriculum is another one. But what are there, are there certain things that that either we've done quite well in England or the that you need to have in place before things are going to be successful. Sue I know you've been doing some reading and writing about this I think recently.

Sue Sentance:

Yes, thank you James. Yes, it brings to mind the Brookings report from 2021 called building skills for life, which I'd recommend everybody has a look at. Where they looked at different countries broadly and then 10 countries in depth including England and came up with some sort of policy moves that countries should make to to get computing going because its all very well us having this view of what [...] the subject is. We need government to be doing, you know, doing particular things. And these are in different areas so it's like is computing in the curriculum in primary and secondary schools? Is it mandatory? Is it elective? Do we have teacher training available in a country? Do we have it before, sort of pre-service training? And do we have in service training? And then interestingly other things that they pick up on is is there government-led funding, substantial funding for the subject in the country? And aligned to that is a, they must have been thinking of England in this way, is the sort of a centre, or a sort of, a sort of national place where teachers can go such as the NCCE. So those are sort of some of the the areas that they think are really important and if you look at countries, I mean Latin America is quite a varied picture because Uruguay is quite far ahead. But other countries in Latin America are still at the stage where it's quite an extracurricular subject. And there's lots of kind of charitable or industry-led activity and then there needs to be move to a sort of a very government-led level. So that that's at the policy level I think. They also say other things around making computing engaging in that but, I've probably had the air for too long.

Niel Mclean:

I think one of the things that always strikes me, my mother's 94 every, every subject that's on the English national curriculum she studied apart from computing. They've been around a long, long, long, long time. And it's [...] the thing that governments always find very very hard around something new. What we want is the kind of experimentation that was described by both both of you Sway, James. Because we don't quite know what this thing is yet, so that requires experimentation. The extent to which you can have that experimentation varies from country to country because it depends on things like accountability measures. How's schools are judged, all those sorts of things. If you've got a high accountability system that judges schools in a particular sort of way. It is quite hard to get the kind of, I'll call it action research it isn't quite, but you know that that development to practice a new sort of stuff off the ground. Because that feels like a high-risk thing to do. And again something I see is the difference between jurisdictions that on the one hand say "Yeah, we're a high-stakes, but because we're a high-stakes we're going to tell you exactly what [...] you've got to do, we're going to produce all the resources you need, and we're going to take a few years to introduce it." And then other countries that say "No, we don't have this high-stakes stuff. So we're quite happy just launching it out there and seeing how practice emerges and encouraging." And then there's some that are in the more challenging position of "We're going to just launch it out there and you'll make the best of it and oh by the way, we're in a high-stakes environment so we'll judge you on it." It's the worst of both worlds kind of thing. So alongside the specifics of how computing is developed are more general issues around the educational landscape itself, that encourage school principals, school leaders, or whatever to innovate or not. And we need innovation in computing cause it's new. And that's, that is universally true of everywhere that I, you know, I'm in touch with it is new.

Sue Sentance:

I think that raises an interesting point of what we in England and in the UK can learn from other countries. So if you look at Sweden, Norway they integrate elements of computing into other subjects and there's other work around the world being done, doing that. Rather we have it as a discrete subject, but, and we don't really know how to integrate it into sort of social studies, and in maths ,and that sort of thing. But maybe that's a direction that we could, we could go in order to bring in more equity as Sway started talking about at the beginning. So we reach more more children. So, but then we need to educate more teachers. So it's, there's I think a lot we can learn from this sort of integration piece elsewhere.

James Robinson:

Well I think, and I wonder if Sway's got a perspective on this, because I think that's something that I've as a secondary teacher, as more primary teachers have sort of embarked on computing and sort of, I can see that skill of being able to take aspects of different disciplines and combine them together into a more holistic experience. You know, that's just part of a primary educators sort of tool kit. I wonder if Sway, you've got any kind of thoughts or perspectives on that? Sorry you weren't here to be interviewed Sway, but I'm just going to ask you that question.

Sue Sentance:

We can always learn from primary.

James Robinson:

Yeah, absolutely.

Sway Grantham:

I would have jumped in any way. But yeah, no, I think it's really interesting. There are definitely logistical challenges. It's much easier to organise a timetable when you have an hour for this, and an hour for that, and to be able to block a group, and that piece that Niel was saying about accountability and who's going to ask you like "Well, where was the objective for this or how did you achieve that?" It's much harder to define if you're doing several things at once. But as you say in a primary space using topic teaching or themes that go across different subjects and a longer time period is very often the case. And I think there's another argument here for, we often have the conversation of why, why is it important for learners to learn these things? Is it to make more programmers because we need more programmers and more network technicians? Or is it because it's a valuable life skill that will benefit any job that they do? And when we're making the argument for the latter actually putting it in other subjects with other subjects supports that argument. It's not because you need it to just learn this very specific subject for this very specific future role. It's because in your geography it might become useful and relevant. Or when you're looking at arts it might become useful and relevant. And that's really going to help learners on that journey to see the role of computing. And again with the equity point more likely to attract a more diverse and a wider range of learners to the subject that aren't seeing it as this very niche thing for a specific purpose.

Sue Sentance:

Yeah like we need to learn reading and writing to use that in all other subjects. And yeah, I think I agree with you that we just, it changes the sort of image of the subject. And it's something, there is something about the image of computer science sort of later on in secondary that I'm not sure that we've quite got right in this country, possibly due to the the nature of the qualification structure as well as content.

Niel Mclean:

I think that's, I think that's right. I held back from the whole equity around qualifications and the point at which people stop it. But it's well over ninety percent of girls in England drop computing at the age of fourteen. Gender is an issue that's been looked at again globally around computing. And there's lots, lots of interesting stuff about that. Very few things that look like magic bullets but making the connections between computing so it isn't like "Yeah, we're going to teach you how to do addition, but we're not going to let you add up anything real." Would be, you know, the most un-motivating way of teaching basic arithmetic. Computing is dangerously like that at the moment. We're going to teach you some basic programming, but we're not going to let you do anything real with it. We're going to keep that all separate, kind of thing. And I think the integration that's talked about would be part of a solution towards gender equity as well. I think it would also be a part of a solution to equity in other, in other domains. It is, it is highly specialised in the way that it ends up being defined in a lot of examinations. And again, that's pretty universal globally. And that's because school-based examinations have been extruded back from a university experience. So people have done "What's the shallows of all of this? Oh it's the bubble sort. So we must teach the bubble sort because that's the shallow end of sorting algorithms." Kind of thing, and you think well all this other stuff that's going on in the world, you know, that's pushing shopping choices at me and doing all this kind of thing or modelling whatever. And I think the other bit is the geographers and the scientists wooden arm wrestle over who owns evaporation and the rain cycle. They'd recognise it was utterly arbitrary where you do it or whatever, and perhaps better if you both do it in some kind of integrated way. But I think as Sway said in high accountability systems, it's easier to divide things up, make specific responsibilities specific, and tick them off. And the whole thing does encourage something which is a is very tick boxy approach to the curriculum, I feel.

Sue Sentance:

But that's just because of our government because we have a fact knowledge based curriculum and not a competency-based curriculum. We don't encourage project-based learning, you know, like the research has shown that project-based learning, learning across subjects in secondary school. Due you know what I mean is, is really valuable. But our [...] what happens in our subject is that that what we, what we know is a good way to learn computing it comes up against the kind of inbuilt way that we do things in England, and I think that's a problem. And I don't, I just think that's you know, something that none of us can really apart from jumping up and down about it, which we do do, do anything about. I'm curious if you think there's a higher level of skill needed for the teachers in managing an approach that is more of a project-based learning? I'm just thinking back to the beginning of the conversation we were saying about teachers, and up-skilling teachers, and having the time and resource in whichever country or in or what stage they're at, it's a real challenge to find practitioners that have a good enough foundation knowledge that they can adapt and flex their understanding of the subject matter and not make it a tick list. If we then go down into more of a project-based learning cross-curricular context, are we then elevating the expectations on teachers and possibly is the ways that we know to mitigate that challenge? That's that's really, that's a really good point. And I'd say two things one is we've crammed, we cram too much in. When you look at what's in the key stage 3. I mean for goodness sake why are we got arrays in the key stage 3 curriculum, we've got from five to develop the skills on a sort of spiral, you know bit by bit. So we need less in the curriculum, understood better, and experimented a bit more with teachers and learners.[...] Otherwise we risk having very fragile knowledge about a lot of stuff. And the second thing is I mean, I know Niel and I sit here and we're not in the classroom. And I have, I put my hand up I haven't been in the classroom since the beginning of 2011, but I was a teacher for 12 years and I remember even then you don't know everything. You know, you've always got kids in the class that know more than you. You've always, you know, there's this stuff that you don't necessarily know and it's one of those subjects where it's really hard to build that confidence to say actually, I don't know that let's explore that together. And you know, these things are changing all the time."No, I don't know about that bit of AI that you're really interested in, but let's explore that together." And I, and I also don't think in this country we engender that sort of confidence for teachers because we have so much regulation and assessment.

Niel Mclean:

If you cram too much in a curriculum, I mean first thing that happens is you don't do anything in any depth so that forces you to the lowest level of recall around things. It's also not really the way things work. So a professional chef will have far fewer tools at her disposal than someone in the kitchen at home its just they're far more flexible and adaptable in how they can use those tools, what they can bring them to bear. So that's when you over stuff the curriculum you lose the opportunity to teach that flexible deployment of the intellectual tools you're developing. So that's, that's the first thing. The second thing it moves you away from lesson preparation towards lesson planning and what I mean by that is it all becomes about the sequence to get through the stuff. Now, I'm all in favour of sequencing if it's a deep sequence that's based on learning. If it's a schedule, I'm not sure that's a great way of thinking about learning. And things that have been talked about like problem based learning need a more, I was going to make a sort of vaguely computer science-y less, less python-y more haskell way of approaching how you prepare rather than sequence what you're learning. So you can respond "Oh, oof" to the things that have happened because you're prepared for the things that happened you're not chasing a schedule. But if you over stuff the curriculum, you have to schedule to get through all the things in the lesson. You can't allow for any kind of deviation about it. And you've got to keep people on track in a very very particular, particular way. So I think it's different. I think it very much depends. I mean globally we've got huge differences in teaching culture. So in some parts of the world that kind of approach would fit in with what particularly primary currently happens. There are places, you know Scandinavia or whatever where it fits in with secondary. But there are also places around the world where everything is hyper scheduled and that's what their curriculum is. It's a schedule of teaching stuff. So the first thing you've got to do is not be quite so precious about every individual bit of stuff, do less better.

James Robinson:

I think that's an interesting point there that you both kind of made about maybe sort of having less, doing less [...] And I think it sort of, balancing that would like we know, we currently, as we mentioned earlier on find ourselves you know maybe on the verge of having to rethink some aspects of our curriculum with AI and you know we want to bring AI into the curriculum. Well, actually we can't just add more. We have to kind of, we have to change. We have to think about what are the sort of, the key notes that we need to be hitting, the key themes, the key ideas and then hitting them well. And making sure that you know learners really understand those, those big ideas at a high level. And then I think [...] maybe add a bit more room for exploration. Now of course exploration is a bit dependent upon the confidence in the capacity of individual teachers as well. So you kind of get into this, there's a, there's multiple tensions there that you've got to kind of like deal with.

Sue Sentance:

No it's interesting that you talk about AI because yeah you're right and, and it's it's not explicitly something that is built into not just our curriculum but all sort of curriculum around the world. But there is a feeling that this is, this is an area that has concepts and skills, which young people are going to need when they leave school. And in order for them to be able to understand how decisions are made and how you know, the social ethical aspects of AI and how to use the tools and those sorts of things even if they're not directly you know, if its not just an economic argument it's going to pervade all of our lives. And maybe we can learn from the what we might have done slightly roll with computer science and Niel talked about we you know, we asked universities what we should put in the curriculum we did end up beginning with a sort of slightly watered-down version of what you might teach at a university as the computer s cience curriculum. Let's not do that for AI, I mean let's think about you know, we need the student voice before we even start. What is important to students and young people and society? We probably need to have a, learn from what's gone before to have a little bit more of a bottom-up approach to thinking about what to teach in this area.

James Robinson:

And I think before I go to Niel, I think thinking about how we approach like our curriculum planning for you know, you know what you talk about their Sue kind of defines a little bit about what's considered the qualifications like the end of GCSE and A-level for example. But actually even from there we worked backwards to be like, well, what did, what are the skills are knowledge the learners need in order to prepare them for this. And then basically tracked backwards to key stage 1 to make sure that we're building skills. So I think there's, it sort of set the tone almost a little bit for all of that all of that learning. Niel?

Niel Mclean:

Yeah, there's an obvious problem with the back tracking thing. You know, we've all got two parents, our parents had two parents. So that means there must be four of them and they each had two parents and there must be eight of them. You get multiplication of entities and you say"Blimey there must have been a lot more people around in the past and there are now." You know, if you follow the tree backwards. You've gotta be careful about that because that's what sometimes happens, it bushes out. Well, they'll need to understand this and they'll need to understand this and they'll need to understand this and then need to understand this. So I, I think you sort of need to do it. But you need to check and balance that you don't just get multiplication of entities. There's a nice Marvin Minsky quote, which I'll get wrong, which I use a lot which is which is basically he says "It does more harm than good to force definitions on things. We don't understand yet." And that speaks to this thing that Sue's talking about. A lot of us need to work out exactly what this thing is rather than rush in and it's the thing of the month. Because there are other things at the moment. You know, I've people talking to people about quantum computing. It is a thing of the moment. I have not yet worked out in my head what that might or might not mean, other than understanding that well things will be really really quick, you know. And yeah HTTPS might not be as secure as you thought it was, you know, when things get really really quick and the banking system will be in trouble. I get all that kind of thing. But what I can't get is what's the essential beyond that, that someone at age seven would need and that's okay because maybe there's nothing, that's okay. Maybe there's nothing, maybe there is but Sue's looking eager to come in.

Sue Sentance:

Well no I was just gonna say that's why we need the research, and the research papers, and also teachers engaging in research alongside. Yeah. I just, I love the idea of different approaches. I think the other one bringing it back to the piece of inclusion and equity is that if we're only asking people at the university level what should be included in a curriculum? We would hope that that would be a representative sample and we know that by the time we're reaching the university level that is not as balanced as we might like it to be. So, the idea of meeting learners where they're at, even a five-year-old at the moment has some experience of AI in some contexts. They may not know it, they may not have the language to talk about it. And even with different levels of device access in the UK coming across it in the world or it being used in their presence is going to be something that they're experiencing but really thinking about how much of that do they need to understand and how much of that they need to be aware of by understanding their world and what it's like to be in a world where you don't understand a lot of what is happening around you and you have to work out, what do I need to know? And What do I, what can I wait a few years till I'm a bit older and have a bit greater level of maturity to understand? And I think there's some really interesting work we could be doing in this space that we have not yet been doing.

Niel Mclean:

I think that's right. I think, I think the whole disciplines bedevilled with a bit of this. If you were to ask, you know geography teacher "Boil geography down to a few sentences." They say "It's the relationship between people and place how people shape places and places shape people and how physical processors shaped places" Done, you know. Geography is a bit more complicated than that because you then get into the detail and you got big ideas like plate tectonics that explain mountain ranges volcanoes whatever. Biologists could say, "Well all life is made of cells, evolution happens through natural selection following random mutation things that survive are the ones that best fitted to their ecological circumstances." Now, I'm not a geographer or, but because I was involved in the, or a biologist, the daring review of the national curriculum back in '94. What I was really surprised by was how some subjects could absolutely articulate what the really big ideas were. The physicists could say "It's conservation laws. You do conservation in continuous quantities for those of you who remember Piaget, in primary school and you go all the way through conservation of mass as one thing, conservation of energy as another thing. When you get a bit older you realise mass and energy Einstein said are equivalent. But they could spell it out, these big ideas, in a way, and they could track them in an age-appropriate way. You know, which I just did there. We can't do that yet, I don't think with computing.

Sue Sentance:

But can I say that makes it quite exciting if you're [...] a keen and specialist computing teacher because the subject's all, if you're teaching another subject, it is all laid out. We are in a sort of, a sort of a, we are in a phase of discovery about our subject and I think we should be bringing teachers along with us and engaging teachers in discussion because you know, because you know, they're the people that are going to be delivering it and understand the children and what's understood. And I think one of the things that we started the conversation by talking about, you know, what's gone well and what are the challenges. I think what's gone well in computing is this development of community. And it started, you know over 15 years ago, whatever, with the Computing At School community and still exists as a community and I think there's amazing teachers out there that have engaged with others, shared resources with others, that have. And it's a joint effort when we try and sort of unpick how we do this better. Are there some fundamentals that we need to think about? And that's not a sort of top-down activity that some government or policymaker's going to decide. Well, it might end up being, but I hope it isn't. I feel it should be you know, it should engage it should be driven by and you know very much engaged by the teachers.

Niel Mclean:

I'm just going to say I agree with everything that's been said by Sue just there. But I am going to tell her off for the use of one word, which it was the word "delivering." If I have one mission in life, it's to kill the use of the idea that someone else creates something and teachers deliver it, you know. You can deliver newspapers, you can deliver coal if you're old enough to remember, it you can deliver all sorts of things. You cannot deliver learning. It doesn't work like that and I think that's got so imbued in our way of thinking about things that someone else produces somewhere else and you're the postal worker that takes it to the child kind of thing. And I know that isn't what you meant Sue but it did give me an opportunity to rant about it.

Sue Sentance:

Okay, well it wasn't what I meant. And yeah, I didn't really, I didn't really intend to say no, that's not in the spirit of how I think about think about these things. But yes, I could harp back on about the sort of the systemic view of our education system in this country that probably let's that word slip in unnecessarily.

James Robinson:

So speaking of our community. If you have a question for us or comment about our discussion today then you can email via podcast@helloworld.cc. Or you can tweet us at helloworld_edu. My thanks to Sue and Niel for sharing their time experience and expertise with us today. We'll be back in two weeks exploring another exciting topic in computing and digital making. So Sway what did we learn today?

Sway Grantham:

I think my biggest takeaway was the reminder that in a subject like ours that is so new and ever-changing not knowing things is inevitable and we need to build resilience and have a plan for how to deal with that in the classroom and at every level of policy as well. How about you James?

James Robinson:

Well, if not knowing things is the way forward then I'm set.