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Technology's Challenge to Education – Westminster eForum Transcript

David Braben, Founder and Chairman of Frontier, recently attended the Westminster eForum as a guest speaker where, while stood amidst an audience of professionals and politicians, gave a talk on the current state of affairs with ICT in British education. The full transcript can be read below.

Once you're finished reading (it's quite long!), we're interested to see what your own thoughts are on ICT in education and on computer games courses within universities, so why not let us know in our official forums.
 

ICT as a driver of change: technology’s challenge to the education system
David Braben, Founder, Frontier Developments

I am Chairman of Frontier Developments; we employ 260 people on the Science Park in Cambridge [United Kingdom] making computer software, mostly computer games. An issue that we had some years ago now was we noticed a sudden drop in the quality of graduates applying to work for us, and it seemed this was across the board. At that time we had been working with a number of universities on things like advisory boards and career type approaches.

So since then I have been looking at what the causes of that were. There were lots of different things suggested, but the thing that stood out was that nationally, since 2001, the number of applicants to computer science courses has dropped by 52%. That is a staggering drop, especially when you think that the actual population of graduates in the same period has risen by 24%.

Now on the face of that you think there must be something behind that, and there are a number of things that could have changed - computers perhaps becoming less fashionable etc. but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Now rolling back, looking at the role of ICT in schools, ICT is really important in making sure that people can use the tools of computing, but unfortunately the introduction of the ICT GCSE and the corresponding national curriculum I think was a real shame, because to be honest most children are actually very, very computer literate when they get to the GCSE age. When a teacher then teaches things that, I mean, disrespectfully essentially ICT at GCSE to me is using Microsoft tools and working out how to switch on and off the computer and familiarising with basic computer techniques which many children already have. Now I can see people shaking their head in the audience, and I do realise I did say that cruelly... From my perspective looking at the sort of recruits we want who do computer science at university, there is a fantastic breadth of things that used to be taught at school level and at university level, prior to the introduction of ICT, for example, we actually had computing and computer science teaching in schools which went away as a result of ICT.

Now people may think I am being partisan here, but the trouble is this has caused a real problem. When I first came at this, looking at it at tertiary education level and the problem that universities had is on the one hand they were strongly encouraged, for all the right reasons, and to be fair ICT was brought in with the best intentions, you know, but the problem in universities is they have seen this very, very big drop. They have been very encouraged by Government to increase the number of graduates, also well intentioned, but the problem with that is there are only so many people who have the necessary prerequisites to do a computer science course. So a number of the universities, and Birmingham was one of them, actually dropped maths out of their curriculum and essentially made the courses less challenging. That was the beginning in my view, the problem then was certain things had to be taught as black boxes, which meant that the knowledge/skills that those same students came out with other end were no longer suitable for us to recruit. We already do a lot of training on the job, but it depends on the gulf of an individual student what they know compared to what we want them to know. And so this caused a real big problem for us.

Now the real problem there is it’s driven out computer science. What has happened at universities because of this bums on seats mentality is a lot of - particularly the ex-polytechnic universities - have brought in courses which have games in the title, you know computer game courses. Speaking as someone from the side where most of the software we do is computer games, I think it is rich for universities to actually put games on the title when actually it’s no such thing. It’s more of a study of computer games, not how you make them, but more of a media studies type approach. Now I think that is tragic because a lot of students don’t do a lot of due diligence before coming into a course, so what they end up doing isn't what they expect, and because of this when they are in the course they realise they are not going to get a job at the end of it, that’s a double tragedy.

Now, for that reason I have joined Skillset where we are trying to approve university courses to actually change this, but one of the things that has come out of it, I mean if anecdotally, we do a lot of studies with games, target markets and all that sort of commercial stuff, but if you ask a kid what was your most boring subject in school, they will now say ICT. In my day that was never the case, anything involving computers was exciting, they were new and the things you did on them were exciting. Games can be used to motivate kids; there is no question about this, if you look at the amount of kid's spare time we [the computer games industry] get criticised for taking much of that spare time because they are enthusiastic about it. You know, the parallel criticism of the games industry is that all games are violent and horrible, actually fewer than 3% of games actually have an 18 rating, so most games are things that are creative, things like Rollercoaster Tycoon, which is a game that we did, The Sims, another one where you are putting things together, you are exchanging things online, you are having good fun and you are learning at the same time, although the kids don’t like to believe that.

So what I would like to say to sum up is, I can see ICT is a very useful thing to do and I am sure there are people in the audience clearly who disagree with my criticism of it, but what I would plea is for the more able students, if there were a way to roll in more things that would be normally termed computer science, i.e. study of generating things. There are some wonderful free pieces of software out there where, for example, you have little fish swimming around that get eaten by sharks, you have little scripts that control each of them and the children can edit them and see what happens - all very, very simple, wonderful creative stuff. Essentially it’s a very, very good doorway into programming. If this sort of thing can gradually be integrated, and I know some schools already teach it under the ICT umbrella, but fundamentally, what worries me is most don’t.

The final point on that is I have heard, again largely anecdotally, that a lot of ICT teaching is being done by teachers who have no experience in ICT; they are often a few pages ahead in the book than the kids. The teacher’s normal subject may be history or it may be art, it’s often not a science subject, and that is the most de-motivating thing possible for a kid. If the kid knows more about a subject than a teacher, they will muck around, they will make the computer do something that they know the teacher can't get out of, and that is a tragedy. Kids want to learn and this is a problem that is only happening in Britain, this is not an international problem, so we, a country that in the 80s were leaders in this front - wonderful machines like the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum you were expected to programme for, and for my generation it really got us involved in an excited way into computing. We can do that now, computers now are actually more exciting and you can do more with them, so we should be grabbing that with both hands.

So that’s my plea and apologies to those who I have implicitly criticised because that wasn’t the intention, this is meant to be a positive comment.

Thank you.