ICT in UK Schools a Scandal but Game Legend Brings Hope

Education in the UK is letting its students down when it comes to Computer Science - and therefore video games of the future damn it! Last night's BBC2 Newsnight feature on how ICT lessons are little more than secretarial lessons will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked in a school or tried to recruit in the UK games industry in recent years.

To those of us who were encouraged to tinker about with Basic when we were younger, it's really quite disappointing. There's a whole generation of children who won't understand the pleasure of the following code:

10 PRINT "Mr Shelley is a NOBBER"
20 GOTO 10
> RUN

It's disappointing but a select group of industry veterans are trying to turn the tide. David Braben, designer of Elite and much more, is part of the team that has developed Raspberry Pi, a mini-computer that will encourage children as young as eight to get under the bonnet and see what can happen when they take control of the code that runs the games they love. With simple instructions, they can even create their own simple games, hopefully setting them on the path to working in the UK games industry; something that's desperately needed if any future for that industry is to come to fruition.

Raspberry Pi should be rolling out its first units by the end of 2011 but the true test will be down to the educators themselves. With the vast majority of teachers lacking in knowledge when it comes to coding, especially in primary establishments, schools will be encouraged to look outside the classroom and bring in professionals to promote Computer Science.

It all sounds lovely and very Big Society, but will it work? With schools focusing squarely on making sure that they're as high up the league tables as possible and teaching to test we can't help but feel that this noble idea of getting kids to code will fall by the wayside. There's no room in the current curriculum for Computer Science.

Introducing it will require a major shift in education policy and many schools will conveniently forget about it unless they are forced to change – something that will cause dissent in the ranks of a vocation that is near constantly up in arms trying to follow change upon change.

However, without a push to get kids into coding along with learning how to use Word, the British game development industry will crumble. While it still remains strong it is inevitable that it will go into decline soon; numbers of Computer Science graduates has dropped steadily in recent years and there just isn't the skillbase out there.

Here's hoping that people like David Braben can reverse this trend, otherwise we'll be left with a stack of Raspberry Pi gathering dust in cupboards in every school in the country while the hardest thing the children learn will be changing fonts and scribbling away on MS Paint.

Watch the episode here. It's available until October 17th 2011.