Teaching Creative Computer Science | Simon Peyton Jones | TEDxExeter

Britain stands today on the brink of a major revolution

for the way we teach our children about computing.

Not all revolutions are good, but this one is.

And it's being watched with intent interest by
other countries around the world and some envy.

So I just want to tell you a little bit about what's
been happening, why it's important and

how you can help to make it a success.

So here, let's start with something that Richard Riley
who was the Secretary for Education

in the United States said:

Education should prepare young people for
jobs that don't exist,

using technologies that have not
been invented,

to solve problems we're not yet aware of.

That's a big challenge, right.
How do we do that?

So here's what we do at school.

So we teach children about skills, that's
immediately applicable knowledge,

typically involving artefacts, you know, so you
might think sowing machines, or band saws

or yes, computer programmes like
Microsoft Office ... right.

So we might teach them how to use this
stuff purposefully and that's

immediately applicable and useful but it
dates fairly quickly.

So to address Richard Riley's point,
we also teach them about

foundational discipline. So you might think
about this as long-term knowledge

so stuff like like physics or history or mathematics,
this lasts you a whole life time,

it doesn't date quickly and we would use words
like 'principles', 'ideas', 'techniques', 'methods',

'body of knowledge', to describe that kind of stuff.

Now, in my field of computing, what has
happened is that the subject,

Information and Communication Technology,

which, praise be, is part of our national
curriculum up to now but has

become focused on technology, right, so it's
even in the very title ...

so it's in the left-hand part of this slide, all
focused around using things purposefully

and thoughtfully. And that is important ...

but we've lost sight, or perhaps never gained
sight of an underlying subject discipline

which is the discipline of computer science
and perhaps that's not surprising but

even at a university level, that's a
fairly young discipline,

certainly compared to physics say.

So it's atrophied the brain (?), so I think
what we've ended up doing is ...

in what we tell our children about computing,
we've ended up focusing too much on

technology, on things, on devices, on
those seductive boxes,

and not enough on ideas.

So I want our children, not only to
consume technology but to be

imaginative creators of technological artefacts.

I want them to be creative writers as well as
appreciative readers.

I want them to understand what they're doing,
how the stuff that their using works,

as well as using it.

Arthur C Clarke once famously remarked that
any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic.

And I think it's very damaging if our
children become to believe that the

computer system they're using are
essentially magic; that is ...

not under their control, made by somebody else,
not something that they can interact with or

indeed, take part in creating with.
I think that's bad.

So, if you walk up to a person on the street today
and ask them 'what does a computer scientist look like?'

They would probably say: 'probably male, socially
challenged, geek, spotty, probably a little bit

like Simon, actually. Well paid, maybe but living
in a basement, writing code'.

I want to encourage you, instead, to think of
computer science in the way that you might

think of science; that is as a
foundational subject

that every child should have the opportunity
to learn from primary school onwards.

That's a big shift in perception, isn't it.

And so, to help you make that shift, I want to
just give you some idea of what

computer science is, particularly in the
context of a school.

So, here are some words, so give me some
answers to do with the study of

information and computation, not primarily
about machines at all,

it should be called computing science really.
It's about algorithms and data structures,

and the way that computational processes
communicate and coordinate.

It involves reusable skills, programming and coding,
certainly, and you will have seen a lot in the press

about why we must teach our kids to code.

But computer science is about much more than that.
It's not just about coding to get the job done,

it's also about broader thinking skills like
computational thinking and abstraction and

modelling and design. So these are all abstract words.

I want to show you, give you a visceral sense of what
computational information might look like

to a computer scientist. So here is a video made
by my, the amazing Tim Bell from New Zealand

showing kids learning to sort. So, here they are
standing on a network drawn on the floor

and when two children walk along those lines
and meet at one of the round circles

they're each holding a number and if the kid
on the left, they swap over if

one number is bigger than the other. If they're
not bigger, they don't swap.

And then when they all start at the beginning
and they do this together, so this is a

parallel algorithm happening, they walk along
the lines and they meet and they swap over

and if everything goes right, will it go right?
Well, actually, I think it's going to go right!

... they end up sorted, at the end.
[audience laughter]

And that, there's something rather wonderful
about that, and you can do it as a

competition, it's kind of quite fun. You can see
who can do it fastest and you can

even do it on a larger scale in a playground.
[audience laughter]

Tim tells me, this five seconds of video
took him all morning to record.

Why did I show you this?
I showed you this because it's fun,

because it involves primary school children,
because it's intriguing, right, there's

something clever happening, and it's because
there's no computers involved anywhere.

This clearly is about computation,
not about technology;

it encourages you to ask questions like:
'could we do this with more numbers?'

'Did the teacher put us in the right order at the
beginning to end up sorted at the end?'

'Shall we try it with a different way round?'

Do you get the idea? And some of those questions
have quite deep answers but I love the way

that a child could ask them.

So that's about computation; let's do
one about information.

So my friend Jared, over here, supposing I
want to exchange a message with Jared,

so you probably have the idea that I could
encrypt it someway if Jared and I shared

a secret key, right, so like, marmalade -
then we could someway encrypt our message,

send it to each other and provided none of
you knew our key, you couldn't decrypt it.

But what if we didn't have a secret key between us?

Could we have a public conversation in front of you all,
at the end of which, Jared and I shared a secret key

that we could use to encrypt our subsequent
conversation but which none of you knew?

That doesn't sound very plausible, does it?
Because if you heard everything we said,

you'd know everything we knew.

But it's possible, it's not only possible,
it's quite easy.

A 12-year-old can understand how it's done.
It's called 'Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange'

and like many of these lovely ideas of computer
science, it's immediately applicable.

When you go onto Amazon or eBay or something and
send your credit card details, a little padlock appears

on your browser and Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
is going on with Amazon or eBay to secure your

credentials because you don't share a secret key
yet with your supplier.

So it's a rather clever idea. It looks superficially
implausible. So that's what I mean about

ideas, not technology.

So, you might say, alright so you convinced me
recently that computer science is kind of interesting

and maybe some kids should do it, but should
every child do it, from primary school?

So, let me ask you this: Why do we ask every
child to learn science from primary school?

Not because they're all going to become physicists.

So why? It's because science teaches us something
about the world around us and that if we know

nothing about the way the world around us works,
we're dis-empowered citizens.

Even when you switch on a light, you know that
the light doesn't happen by magic, it happens

by electricity that comes along wires, that wires
can be dangerous, that electricity comes from

a power station, that the power station burns fuel,
it may cause global warming ... all of that is

underpinned by the science knowledge that you
gained at school whether or not you're a scientist.

And so I think it's very important that every child knows
something about the digital world that they inhabit

which is so, as we heard in our previous talk, so
infuses every aspect of our lives.

And it's not just the built world, the artificial world,
computation increasingly helps us to understand

the natural world too. If you look at a termite
colony that builds these incredible structures

that architects are still trying to figure out how
did they get so well ventilated, is there a

giant termite brain that designs that structure?

No. Somehow these little creatures operating very
simple programs in their very simple brains,

which collectively do something amazing.

And computer scientists are very interested in working
out how that distributed computation takes place.

Other colleagues of mine at Microsoft are working out
how cells figure out whether they're going to become

kidneys or backbones; and that's a little computational
process that's going on, you know, in the bodies of

embryos all the time. So increasingly we're thinking of
computation of a way to understand the natural world.

And lastly, of course, computer science gives you
generic thinking skills that are useful regardless

of what profession; so analysis and design and
computational thinking are useful in any profession.

Now I know every subject likes to tell you that but
in the case of computer science, it's true. [laugher]

So, all we have to do then, is to establish an entirely
new subject at school - computer science.

The amazing thing is that this is not an
aspiration; this is reality.

There's been a review of the national curriculum
and as from September 2014,

there really is a new subject called 'Computing'; right,
not Information Technology any more, though

it still includes the good bits of using and
applying computers

but the term covers computer science and IT and
I want to show you, in this new curriculum, the aims.

The whole curriculum is only three pages of A4.
You can easily read it, but here are the aims, right:

Four aims. Can understand and apply the fundamental
principles of computer science, including logic and algorithms.

Can analyse problems in computational terms and
have repeated practical experience of

writing programmes to solve them. No other country
in the world has statements anything like as crisp as this

from, remember, this applies from primary school onwards
right the way up to GCSEs so I think this is a big breakthrough.

So it's happening right here and everybody else is very
interested in watching us, we're in pole position here

in the world but many other countries are struggling
with these exact same issues and we're all

fumbling our way towards finding a good solution.

We in Britain happen to be in that exciting and
dangerous position of being in pole position here.

So, what is the new challenge? Well, it's no long to
change the policy, it's to encourage and support and

equip our existing computing teachers to do a
fantastic job of delivering this new curriculum

and that's not easy. They are motivated, they are
hard-working, they care deeply about their children

but many of them come with not enough background in
computer science because, after all, they've never been

asked to do this before. So we have to help them.
So who is going to help them? Well, we are.

So, in the past, it would have been the government,
right, and the government this time is standing back,

they're providing air-cover in the form of a curriculum,
they're providing some money, but basically it's the

sector, teachers, universities, IT professionals, software
developers, the people in this room, the people

watching this video, everybody has got to get together
and help our schools to make a fantastic job of this

and to deliver it with, not reluctantly and grudgingly but
with confidence and enthusiasm because I think we can.

So it's actually a kind of big society thing; this is the
big society actually working.

There's a kind of creative wave of enthusiasm. These are
a whole bunch of little groups that have grown up in

the United Kingdom and there are many others elsewhere
in the world doing similar things in their own country

that are trying to support schools and students to run
co-clubs after school, to support and mentor teachers

and, just at the moment, to run training
courses to support teachers.

Let me tell you very briefly about one, which is the
'Computing at School' group which I'm chair of

and helped start a few years ago. 'Computing at School'
has been at the epicentre of this whole exercise,

it's a volunteer grass-roots organisation which now has
10,000 members but it was the, probably, the

organisation that probably made the case for
establishing computer science as a component

of our school curriculum and so we're now
stepping up to this challenge of running a

big programme of training for our
teachers across the country.

But it is a big challenge;
there are 3,500 secondary schools,

there are 17,500 primary schools;
and this is England alone.

Scotland and Wales and Ireland are going
through similar upheavals in their own country;

the curriculum I showed you is just for England;
so there is a lot to do.

And that means that you can actually
do something to help so, if you're

in the IT Sector specifically yourself,
you can be, you have specific things to give,

like you could start a co-club, run an
after-school programming club in schools;

you could go to your school and give a talk
or just be a role-model;

you could speak to your computing teachers
and act as a mentor for them;

but even if you're not an IT or computing
specialist, you could talk to your school

about what their response to the new curriculum is;
is it a fearful one or confident one;

what can we do to get them more support to make
it possible, there are a lot of schools and so this

is a boots on the ground job, this is not a sort of
air war, something that can be solved centrally,

all of us have to help, so if you just, if just we all
sit around and wait for somebody else to do it

nothing will happen, right. There's a kind of
fantastic opportunity here.

So, just let me finish by going back to our children;
what are we hoping to gain from this?

I hope that our children, if we make a good job
of establishing the new computing curriculum

in its breadth from computer science through
to ICT and digital literacy, if we make

a good job of that, I think they will become
more engaged and curious and playful

about the digital technology and also about
the natural world that surrounds them.

I want them to become creator, creative users
of computers and there's nothing more creative

than writing programmes, actually.
There's these enormous artefacts that

people build out of pure imagination.
I want them to be informed and empowered

citizens who understand enough about the technology
that surrounds them, that they can make informed

choices about it. Again, harking back to our previous talk,
and I do want them to have jobs too.

I haven't emphasised that very much but in the
modern knowledge economy, nothing equips

you better for a good job than having the
skills that I've spoken about.

So, I think we have a sort of once in a generation
opportunity to do something remarkable;

to make a qualitative improvement in the kind
of education we give to our children.

So there is everything to play for;
but it's not going to happen by magic.

It's going to happen because you help to make it happen.
Thank you. [applause]