It鈥檚 the fourth R (Image: AFP/Getty)
鈥淢um! Dad! My program won鈥檛 terminate and I haven鈥檛 initialised my variables.鈥� In the biggest shake-up to the curriculum since computers were first introduced to schools, this month children aged 5 and up in England will be taught how to write software and not just how to use it.
Read more: 鈥�Code generation: Kids who program before they can read鈥�
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If you鈥檙e used to helping with your kids鈥� homework but don鈥檛 know your booleans from your for-loops, you鈥檙e not alone. According to , 60 per cent of parents are either unaware of or are unclear about the changes to IT lessons that came into effect this week. Many teachers at primary and secondary schools have had to take crash courses to learn the basics before teaching the subject.
If you鈥檙e curious about coding yourself, why not do the same? Here are a few handy resources to get your whole family on board.
A good place for beginners is , which has plenty of tutorials and exercises covering the basics, from drag-and-drop programming with the graphical starter language to widely used languages like Python, Ruby and Javascript. 鈥淭here is more than enough there for anyone of any age,鈥� says , head of computing at Egglescliffe School in Stockton on Tees, UK.
For the slightly more adventurous, there鈥檚 , a website with interactive tutorials for HTML and PHP as well as Python, Ruby and Javascript again. Get to grips with these and you will have mastered some of the core languages underpinning the web 鈥� YouTube was originally written in Python, for example.
Start from Scratch
You can also . A product of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch will be used in many schools. Like Blockly, it lets you build a program out of ready-made blocks of code.
Another advantage is that projects made with Scratch can be shared online. 鈥淎 good idea, once youngsters have figured out how to do a little bit in Scratch, is to encourage them to remix other people鈥檚 work,鈥� says Clarkson. This will let them see how other people have done things and learn from it 鈥� plus changing something that is already there can also be easier than starting with a blank canvas. 鈥淩eading is always a prerequisite to writing,鈥� Clarkson says.
The British Computer Society has a that introduces the new curriculum and lists a handful of resources. And the , set up to support primary school teachers, offers resources that would also be useful to parents.
The most important thing is for parents to be supportive, says Clarkson. 鈥淐omputer science is an area where people will get it wrong lots of times before they get it right,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his is something that young people are typically not exposed to very much in schools these days.鈥� Learning together could help. 鈥淧arents may well find the same bits tricky that their children do, which may well be a huge confidence boost for the child,鈥� says Clarkson.
