Computing Cousins

Do we needs to encourage contrbutions from a wider group of people to widen the gene-pool of the computing community?

In my role as "lead teacher" I've conducted a number of interviews for teaching jobs.

When we were interviewing for a Maths teacher, I asked the question "Why do we teach maths?" My colleagues on the panel liked the question, and none of the candidates flinched when I asked it.

What we really wanted to know was the applicants' interest in the subject - how "mathsy" they were, and whether they thought beyond the requirements of the National Curriculum or the content of the GCSE specification.

Not long after that I saw a question in a forum for computing teachers, asking people to suggest interview questions for a Computing position. I suggested "What is Computing?", and immediately a number of people replied to say that they found the question offensive.

Why might that be? How has the teaching profession arrived at a point where it's offensive to ask a prospective employee what they think they will be teaching?

Some of the responses said that the "correct" answer was that Computing is "a combination of digital literacy, computer science and ICT". That's a phrase that we see quite often, but I'm not entirely sure where it's from - it's not wording that appears explicitly in the National Curriculum, for example.

It reminded me a little bit of the old A level ICT content, and the distinction between de jure and de facto standards. The "digital literacy, computer science and ICT" mantra seems to have become a de facto standard.

This is by no means a criticism of people that I'm not about to name, but I wonder whether part of the problem is the limited pool of people we see at conferences and other gatherings of Computing teachers. I've been to three in the last year and I've seen the same people every time.

And, again, this is no criticism of those people (I was tickled to be described as a "computing presence" myself by an attendee at one gathering), as I've often found their contributions useful, but the same set of people is also active on social media.

How did so few people come to dominate the subject? I think it's a situation that's been brought about by curriculum change, academisation, and changes in government.

Fifteen years ago, we had county-wide "subject leader" meetings where staff from a variety of schools would get together and share ideas. We also had the exemplification documents that were published along with revisions of the National Curriculum, and LA subject advisers. Social media wasn't so popular, although a handful of people used the (now defunct) TES Community and shared things for free in TES Resources.

The meetings and advisers were the first victims of the coalition government cuts, and academies opted out of the county-wide VLE that we could have used to communicate. Then came Michael Gove and the new National Curriculum, but without any sort of explanation or exemplification, so people looked further afield for ideas.

Commercial resources were produced and schools bought them, leading to a limited number of providers dominating the market. This is no criticism of the materials and tools produced by the resource providers, but when everyone uses them it can distort what is taught across the country and change the nature of the subject - we can get new descriptions of concepts, specific examples get entrenched, etc. Teachers complain about exam questions, asking questions such as "Who describes binary in that way?", when what they possibly mean is "My resources don't describe binary in that way".

This can be an especially potent effect when combined with teachers that are new to the subject, with terms like "definition" and "decision" or "conditional" wiped out by "assignment" and "selection" (which I don't recall hearing on my Computer Science degree or during my time in the software industry). Even processes like converting to normalised floating-point binary aren't done in the same way as they used to be

In teacher training, subject content is becoming less important than pedagogy - ECTs know about cognitive load, retrieval practice, spaced learning, etc., but students need to have knowledge before they can recall it.

This all results in a progressive narrowing of the subject. Earlier in the summer I heard someone say that certain content providers "should be knighted as saviours of computing", but what we really need is to widen the gene pool and get more people involved in creating content and sharing ideas. So go on - create a resource, share a new programming task, write a blog. If it's different from what other people have already said or shared, then… good!

This blog was originally written in September 2024.