Two lines of code can change your life

I've written about this before (and I'll most likely write about it again), so apologies in advance if I bore people to death with it. It's the issue of education and computing. There have been a few reports recently indicating that computing courses in the UK are failing their students, the worst examples being some of the specialist games development courses: just 12% of graduates having found a job in recent times.

I write code for a living, and I enjoy my job. I'm very lucky to be doing something that I really want to do, and I think that I'm doubly lucky because it's taken me a long and improbable route to get here. And fundamentally, that route started when I was about seven or eight, and I first wrote the lines:

10 PRINT "My name is David"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Suddenly, my television screen was filled with an endlessly repeating filler of My name is David. I'd managed to get a computer to do something that I had told it to. I was hooked. Over the next few years I would often be found hunched over the beige keyboard of my trusty Acorn Electron, typing in programs and trying to get them to work. By the time I was fourteen, just typing in other people's code wasn't enough, and I began to try and write my own from scratch, starting an epic quest to produce a text adventure game.

I don't know what it was that really spurred me on, whether it was getting to hang around with some seriously talented young developers (I kid you not, these guys had clubbed together and written an email application for the school network while I was still working on drawing a circle on the screen), or that I was very much supported by the school I was in, but despite a long time not working in the IT industry, I came back to college, and picked up Java again. And it was almost like I'd never left.

The thing is, when I was younger, it seemed so much easier to start programming. The languages were so much closer to you - heck, the Electron started up with a BASIC prompt. I can well see someone these days enrolling on a programming course and being slightly taken aback when presented with their first view of an IDE or a command line.

Now, I'm not living in the UK at the moment, so I guess I'm not really qualified to talk about the way that ICT is taught there, and I'm not well enough acquainted with the details of ICT eduction in Ireland, either. But the reports that more and more computing lessons are heading towards teaching basic office skills are a little worrying. It's not that people don't need the ability to use the word processor / spreadsheet / office suite du jour, but it would be great to see other classes available for people who really do want to stretch themselves. There are plenty of resources on the web these days - with many kids it might just take a small push in the right direction, and boom - we have another killer app developer in the running.

It sounds like we might be moving in the right direction at last though, with a few new initiatives kicking around to try and get children interested in the reality of computer science from a younger age, and I really do believe that one of the ways to do that is to show them how easy it is to get started. Show how quickly you can put together a web page. Write a little java program to print stuff out on screen or a simple game. Try and get hold of some of the old computer controlled Lego Technic, or - better yet - the new Mindstorms NXT. Given the choice between working on a spreadsheet and teaching a robot to walk? I know which one I'd choose.

People keep talking about the knowledge economy. We've got to make sure that we create a generation who are going to be up to creating that knowledge, not just using the fruits of it.

Remember, sometimes all it takes to spark an interest is two lines of code. (Though next time, please don't use GOTO. Bad habits and all that ;-) )