How many mobile phones have you confiscated this term alone? An annual computing education report from the University of Roehampton has found that only 12% of this year’s GCSE students have opted to study Computing to GCSE level; more worryingly, only 2.7% have continued this through to A-Level. This may seem like an odd statistic when you consider the small stack of impounded phones sitting in your desk drawer....
Back in the day, I elected to study Computing (then called ICT) at AS-Level. Bright-eyed and expectant, I rolled up to my Sixth Form on the first day of term, ready to learn about programming, website design, and the mysteries of binary machine code. I had already learned to touch-type from my frantic late-night chatting sessions on MSN Messenger (an Instant Messenger application popular in the 2000s), so I felt like I had a good grounding in the subject....
When it comes to ICT academia, we're being quickly overtaken by other countries. Computers are everywhere nowadays, but less than 2% of A-Level exams sat in 2016 were for Computing. Aside from the obvious pastoral and safeguarding benefits of computing education and digital literacy, the world of work is a fast-changing landscape, and education needs to keep up with the needs of the modern workplace. To keep up with tech-savvy super-nations like India and China, we need to involve British children in computing from a primary school age to develop a genuine interest in the subject....
Every year, digital devices are becoming smaller, more portable, and more powerful. Long gone are the days of the oversized brick; the smartphone reigns supreme....