Five ways to make IT exciting again

Students have lost interest in learning about IT — largely thanks to an education system that has been teaching office skills to children and calling it computing.

England's IT curriculum is facing a massive shake-up and Australian IT student numbers haven't been meeting demand. Here's how to show students (and grown-ups) that computing is fun.

1. Make programming easy

Sitting down and learning the programming vernacular, the nuances of variables, methods and objects, can be daunting.

But there are plenty of ways to learn programming that are gentle on beginners, such as tools that allow users to create programs by using drag-and-drop or tile-based interfaces. Examples include MIT's Scratch, Microsoft's Kodu, Alice and GameMaker.

These provide a simple way for tech amateurs to learn about behaviours like changing variables and creating branching programs without having to get their hands dirty with code.

For anyone wanting to get a bit closer to programming languages themselves there are sites like Codecademy, which teaches users JavaScript via a series of interactive tutorials, starting with the basics and explaining each step.

While tools such as Greenfoot provide a programming environment that helps novices get to grips with Java and object-oriented programming using a simple GUI.

If none of these tools hit the spot then there's the forthcoming Raspberry Pi, a US$25 Linux computer created with the ambition of making it easy to learn coding, which can be set up to boot straight into programming environments for a variety of languages, such as Python or C.

Computing at School, a group dedicated to promoting good IT teaching, also provides links to many other useful free resources on computing.

2. Break out the robots

If coding simple games doesn't kindle the kids' interest then how about having a robot at their beck and call. The Lego Mindstorm platform allows kids to build robots that will allow them to learn both about electromechanics — how to use servos, motors, sensors and the like to create a moving robot — and how to control them using a relatively simple programming interface.

Alternatively, there's the Arduino, an open-source platform that allow users to build their own DIY electronics. Arduinos are essentially small, cheap, programmable microcomputers that can be combined with input and output devices like sensors, LEDs and microphones, and controlled via a custom, easy-to-use programming language. Arduino users have used the platform to create everything from a kettle that only boils when it isn't watched to a motion-sensing teddy bear.

If you just want to tap into the "wow" factor why not let kids tinker with the SDK for the Microsoft Kinect, the vision and speech recognition system for the Xbox 360 and PC. Hobbyists have already taught Kinect to recognise real-life objects, speak their names and to create a 3D scan of a room.

3. Delve into computing's past

If you want someone to learn the principles of how a modern computer works then show them the very first room-sized number crunchers. Crack open a computer case today and the chips and circuitry offer little clue to what makes computers tick, but in the days of the first electromechanical and electronic computers the inner-workings of information processing were writ large in the punched cards and red-hot valves.

Take kids to the likes of the National Museum of Computing to see the Colossus, the valve-based machine that helped crack Hitler's Lorenz code in WWII. Show them how punched cards were used to program the Jacquard Loom or to rapidly count data in the Hollerith Tabulating Machine, and help them understand the evolutionary link between the iPhone and the 1940s electromechanical computer, the Z3. What better way to teach them about the building blocks of computing that have vanished from view.

4. Get cracking with codes

Cracking codes may seem to be a far cry from coding, but writing algorithms to carry out pattern recognition and extract relevant information from data are key skills when both breaking ciphers and programming. Not to mention that cracking codes is fun.

The UK intelligence agency GCHQ certainly sees the link, recently running a codebreaking challenge campaign to find cybersecurity specialists that required entrants to use methods including obfuscation mechanisms and reverse engineering of malicious binary code. Obviously a classroom codebreaking session would be significantly less challenging, but would still provide a useful and rewarding way for kids to learn skills relevant to computing.

5. Game the system

If universities want more teenagers to study computer science courses then why not enlist the help of the video games industry. Colleges should work with major games publishers to create scholarships, extended work placements and professional mentoring for computer science undergraduates. Providing a clear career path from studying computer science into the video games industry would encourage more teenagers to choose to pursue a career in computing, and could also reduce numbers of computer science graduates who choose to work outside of IT after leaving university.

Can you think of more ways to make IT — and careers in IT — more attractive to the next generation of workers? Let us know your thoughts.

Via TechRepublic