Do we need coding in our Canadian classrooms?
Apparently yes, and soon.
If our kids don’t get on that educational horse soon, they are going to find themselves well behind students from several other nations who are.
Listening to a technical education expert two weeks ago, what I heard were words to the effect that, while Canadian kids are learning how to use computer programs and apps, the kids in several other countries are learning how to build these programs and apps.
But can it be done in places like Saskatchewan where the education ministry is imposing financial cuts?
There have to be significant costs associated with continually upgrading hardware and software for our computerland programs.
What I heard was that coding challenges were being placed before kids as early as Grade 5, so it’s not just our high school programmers who have to start sweating.
What are the costs for getting our educators up to speed on coding lessons? It seems they have already fallen behind instructors in a few other countries already, so what would it take in terms of money and hours to bring them up to speed, and then keep them abreast of the thundering herd?
Then there are questions of fitting the coding programs into an already strained curriculum. Where could they be included unless the typical school day is going to be expanded?
Last time new curriculum items hit the education circuit, English and Literature classes took the hit. Where would the new sacrificial lambs be found? Or should our students start classes at 8 a.m. and go to 4 p.m.?
This is an area, in which I presume, the skill-building agendas are being updated every other week, along with the equipment needed to deliver the programs effectively. Gee, another challenge.
I think I failed Computer 101. I had to learn what I learned on the fly. There was nobody available to provide proper tutorials for those of us who were well past high school when the computerized era began in the late 1980s and then bloomed in the 1990s.
There were no formal instructions for those of us who were seat-of-the-pants students.
We either picked it up by osmosis and by observing others who knew what they were doing, and asking a bunch of dumb questions that sometimes resulted in a bit of eye-rolling disbelief from the 25-year-olds who not only knew what to do on the keyboards, servers and screens, but also had mastered the jargon. In fact, our old “newspaper jargon” went out the window once the desktop, laptop and tablet gurus got hold of our industry and swept through it with new-look features that appeared suspiciously like the old-look features, only with new titles attached.
Of course the culture of writing and reporting changed too. No longer was it so important to get it right, just as long as you got it first. Thank goodness that ship was righted in time and social media hasn’t quite yet superseded the traditional world of reportage … but it’s coming.
Of course coding won’t be for everyone, just like calculus or the history of English literature isn’t for everyone in the classrooms of tomorrow.
But, it seems, it needs to be offered soon as a primary alternative within the structured school system, not just as an add-on for a well-trained teacher to offer to a few kids “after school” if they’re interested. It needs to be mainstream, it seems, or our Saskatchewan-made computer whiz kids of today will only be hired as assistants and coffee-retrievers for the computer wizards of tomorrow.
