An ode to the Acorn Electron, or: Thoughts on Computing in Education

*beep*

Acorn Electron

BASIC

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Ahh, nostalgia. I think my folks still have the first computer I ever used somewhere, up in the attic. An Acorn Electron, with a whole thirty-two kilobytes of RAM, and no disk drives - you had to plug in a temperamental tape deck and wait fifteen agonising minutes loading a game before you found out that you'd set something up wrong and you'd have to start all over again. But I loved it. And nearly as much as the games (Citadel! Palace of Magic! Frenzy!), I loved the idea that you could write your own programs for it, too. I spent hours trying to write my own versions of the games that I played, by typing in programs that I found in magazines, and then spending just as many hours trying to figure out which of the semi-colons or quotation marks that I'd typed wrongly.

I sometimes stop to think about how I would have turned out born just a few years later. The Electron, by booting straight into this (admittedly crude) programming environment, really made the point that you were supposed to try and do your own thing with the computer rather than just accepting what other people had written.

I don't know a great deal about the current state of computing in education, but it's something that I should find out more about. I remember that IT lessons were adventures in controlling a turtle onscreen, or (if we were lucky) controlling actual Lego connected to the serial port. It really opened your eyes to the possibilities of computers as tools. I'd like to think that there are some quick and easy programming languages for kids still out there. Whatever happens in the future, we can't just have computing lessons being restricted to learning how to use the office software suite du jour. What a way to kill any enthusiasm.

There's no shortage of resources for programming education. And the thing is, many of them are free: look at Greenfoot, for Java. It hides a lot of the complexity of the language: but that's a great way to start. It's got a graphical interface: that's great.

The problem is, of course, that to teach Java, you need to know some Java in the first place. And how do we get that kind of knowledge imparted? How many teachers are there in schools with any kind of programming knowledge? Not nearly enough. Following on from that, these programs also need to be installed, set up, and maintained. Who's going to take care of that? Much easier to just teach kids how to use the internet, a word processor and a spreadsheet.

Perhaps a special kind of week-long code camp could be run for children with any kind of interest in programming: do a week of classes in the summer holidays covering the very basics - and give pointers on places to look for further information. It might whet someone's interest, and - who knows - might produce the programmers of tomorrow.