In a previous blog posting I mentioned I had been asked to help
with mentoring the Go-Berserk team in Northern Ireland. They don’t actually
need much to help them but it’s a fantastic initiative to help inspire young
people and with what they can do in IT. This is a generation that uses IT
without thinking about it, you see young children before they go to school able
to work on iPads and smartphones but in order to get them to have her interest
in what is behind them you need to understand how that works.
The idea behind Go-Berserk is to IT knowledge into schools
for children as young as eight and when I first met Ian Simons he had one study
guide published to show children how to build a webpage with HTML. He and Dr Irene Bell were writing an
academic paper* on a research study to determine if the Go-Berserk initiative was
a success that should be continued.
What they did was invite education establishments from
across Northern Ireland to participate in a pilot, then they selected 11
to take part. They meet with each group simply to explain the study and then
each was given the first book in the series and asked to work through that
with their selected group. Many of the teachers thought that they were
actually going to get training themselves and one of the things that encourage
them to take part with this was the misconception that they would have their
own IT skills enhanced. So it was a big surprise when they were just given a book
and told to get on with it, however this is where the book proved to be a
success and they were able to work through it with very little trouble. Each of
the studies was successful in creating their own websites and there were
surveys taken before and after this to get feedback and then participants were
interviewed on video in order to build up an understanding of how the project
had gone.
The results of the study were published in a book and
presented to the business and academic community this week in Northern Ireland
and I was very privileged to be invited along. The day started with Naomi Long MP who talked about the importance of IT and the transferable skills that this
would give young people such as logic, data processing and time management. She
talked about the fact that all children are users of IT but they need to
understand what is behind it. She also talked about the fact that the ICT
traditionally taught in schools was about how to use IT and our young people
need to know how to ‘create’ IT. She reminded the audience that the Go-Berserk
team had recently won a digital heroes award and she was hoping or rather had
the intention of getting them in front of the Minister of Education in
Westminster.
For me the most important part of the day was listening to
the children who taken part in this and remember the average age was 9 or 10. I
loved what they had to say:
“Our website looked just like what
you’d find on the Internet”
“If you got even just a bracket
wrong it could change anything even just the font”
“Now when we look at real websites
we think we know how to do that”
The study guide helps to create a website based on the
Vikings story that children at key stage 2 are already studying as part of
their history curriculum but over half of the pilot groups chose to create
websites with different content to show that they had learnt the basics from the
guide and then they tailored that for themselves.
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| Ian and the children from St John the Baptist Primary School |
During the day one story was told about a shy, difficult
child who normally found it a problem to fit in the classroom but this project
was to change that, he enjoyed the work, was able to create his website quickly
and his ability in this area and his willingness to help others in his
classroom changed their perception of him and it has helped him improve in all
areas.
One area picked out as being excellent in the study guide
was the methodology, how easy it was to understand each new learning point and
the interesting facts that were introduced on each page. All teachers agreed
that they want this to continue not only in primary schools but also through to
secondary education.
This study undertaken at Stranmillis University College, the teacher training branch of Queens University Belfast was assisted by a grant from the General Teaching Council that allowed Ian to take time out of his normal teaching duties. Mr Ivan Arbuthnot from GTC reminded us that Northern Ireland had been at the forefront of many things over the years and this was another opportunity for us to excel and we mustn’t let the opportunity to disappear.
This study undertaken at Stranmillis University College, the teacher training branch of Queens University Belfast was assisted by a grant from the General Teaching Council that allowed Ian to take time out of his normal teaching duties. Mr Ivan Arbuthnot from GTC reminded us that Northern Ireland had been at the forefront of many things over the years and this was another opportunity for us to excel and we mustn’t let the opportunity to disappear.
John Healey the Director and Head of Technology at CITIBelfast and major tech employer in the area talked about the global shortage of
IT resources. He said we needed the next generation and this will help, we don’t
know what code they will be using when they reach the workplace but these kids
will have the skills that underpin IT and those will be transferable. John also
talked about how Ian had lit up a recent Momentum Digital Summit with his
enthusiasm.
I left this study launch feeling good about the future, I
had listened to young people or rather I had listened to children, both girls
and boys who were infused about how IT works; they had worked both in school
and begged to take their work home to show their parents. Not only had they understood
how the pages appeared on the Internet but knew they could also change them themselves.
The Go-Berserk team intend to have a series of study guides covering a range of skills and the one that really excites me is the third in that series, due at Easter 2014 which covers Java. We know that Oracle has stood behind Java and made it core of their development stack because this is an area where standardised means we can drive down the cost of IT and try and address that shortage of skills. Java is being taught in universities today, this Go-Berserk program will help to teach them even earlier and then encourage these children to take up education post school and careers in IT. I don’t know a lot of the details but in the user group community Devoxx has a kids program and I would be very interested in their feedback on the Java study guide when it’s available and look forward to sharing it with some of my Java Champion friends in that community.
So what’s this got to do with me or Oracle other than
providing them a pipeline to the future? I’ve also said in previous postings that UKOUG
are working with the Oracle Academy to see how we can help with the next
generation and we will again be looked at in the UKOUG Tech conference which starts
in just a couple of days in Manchester. Come along on Monday if you’re
interested in this and hear more about it.
* Bell, I and Simons, I. (2013) Teaching Coding to KS2 and KS3 Pupils, Stranmillis University College, Belfast.
