The Successful and the Passionate: An Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones
It seems to me that people who are passionate and successful in one area of their life are often just as passionate in other areas. In this interview series “The Successful and the Passionate” I talk to some successful and passionate people about things they have a passion for that perhaps aren’t so well-known. Today, we talk to Simon Peyton-Jones about “Computing At School”. Simon Peyton-Jones is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a contributor of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). In 2011, he and Simon Marlow were awarded the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for their work on GHC. He is the author of a number of books, a husband and a father. Simon, you’ve agreed to talk to me about “Computing At School”. Can you tell me, briefly, what makes you so passionate about this group? I started getting involved in this because of my children. My eldest was aged 12 and going to school and doing a subject called ICT, but they found it extremely dull, even though the school as a whole was really very good. I found I couldn’t really make any sort of connection between the discipline to which I had devoted my professional life, and which I thought was just the most exciting thing on the planet, and this subject they were doing at school. On further investigation I found that ICT in many schools (though not all) had come to mean little more than how to use Microsoft office. And certainly, even at its best, it is to do with the purposeful use and application of computers -- but it wasn’t at all about how computers work. It was like learning about how to drive a car, even how to drive a car safely and purposefully, but not at all about something like internal combustion, or how cars work, or how you might design and make them, which is what my professional discipline is about. I started to get involved in looking at if there was a way to reform the school curriculum in ICT, because everybody I spoke to seemed to think that it needed reform; that that children were too often being taught things they knew already, too often by a teacher who was really a geography teacher who had a spare period, too often taking qualifications that did not challenge them. In short, the whole subject seemed to have spiralled into a bad place where it was a low-status subject with low achievement: and I wanted to fix that. You are the chair of the board for CAS. How did things start? We started CAS back 2007/8 and it just had 3 or 4 people in it at that stage. it was just a grassroots bunch of volunteers and we grew fairly slowly. For a long time we were below 100 members -- now we are on 4,000 members. And for a long time we felt that we were very much the underdog. We were saying we have got to think of this subject as a subject discipline in the way as you might think of Maths and Physics, that is a subject with a body of knowledge, and tools and techniques and ideas that don’t change very quickly and aren’t even very closely coupled to technology, per se. Computer Science is algorithms and ideas and data structures and computational thinking, it’s not primarily about computers or about any particular programming language or programming in general: it’s about computation. Establish the idea of computer science as a discipline. None of that comes over in schools at the moment, and our goal was to establish the idea of computer science as a subject discipline that every child should learn in the way that they learn physics. We teach Physics to everybody, to the ones who are going to become physicists -- that tiny minority -- but also to the hairdressers and lawyers and plumbers. Everybody gets a bit of science at primary school, because science governs the world that they live in -- and in the same way, digital things govern the world that they live in. Some elementary knowledge about how that digital world works and sense of empowerment is really important. It was a strange connection between my professional discipline, which I am very excited about because I think computer science is so interesting, and on reflection realising that really does have repercussions at school level, and it was not being recognised. But what if we put together in a room all the people who feel powerless about this issue, and who think it is terrible “but what can you do before the might of the supertanker that is the nation’s education system”? It was like saying “everybody thinks this is silly, but nobody thinks they can change it”, but if everybody thinks it is silly then maybe if we all would all say at once “This is silly!” we could do something about it. You mentioned you have children of your own. What does Computing At School means in the lives of your children? For my children, it’s a rather eccentric crusade that I am on. My eldest has now graduated from university, so it’s all water under the bridge as far as he’s concerned, and my eldest daughter is doing her A-Levels, so it’s not going to affect them directly at all. But we have succeeded in having a major effect on the education system, and there is a review of national curriculum going on at the moment, and we’ve had a big effect on that. The new draft of the National Curriculum for computing really does enshrine Computer Science as a part -- not all of, but a part -- of what every child should learn about computing at school. It’s amazing, we’ve made an incredible impact in a very short time. What do you personally consider the main challenges surrounding Computing at School to be? A little while ago I would have said getting policy change at national level, because the Department of Education does express policy about what should be taught when at school, getting the Department of Education to understand the idea of Computer Science as a discipline is a big, big thing. A few years ago that was the big issue. The second big issue was availability of qualifications, until 2010 there were no GCSEs in Computer Science -- and if there is no GCSE in a subject you can’t study it, it’s that simple. If there’s no GCSE in basket weaving you can’t study basket weaving at Key Stage 4, it’s just not possible. Until 2010 there were no GCSEs in Computer Science. There were several in ICT, several in the use and application of computers, but nothing at all that involved programming or understanding how computers work with regards to algorithims or computational thinking -- it’s extraordinary in a devleoped country. This was a huge roadblock, so a few years back I would have said getting a range of qualifications in computer science available to school children so that they can progress from primary school through qualifications to GCSE, through qualifications at A Level, to university if they want -- and each stage it would be a smaller and smaller number, as with any subject. But both of those things we have, more or less, done. All the awarding bodies are now offering GCSEs in computing science and the Department of Education really does recognise the importance of computer science. To answer the question, the challenge now is to get that change propagated into every school. In particular, we have a cohort of ICT teachers who are very well motivated and smart, and certainly very powerfully motivated to help their pupils. They are very, very diligent and hardworking and well-motivated, but they are, by and large, under qualified in computer science. Many come in the profession from business studies, or geography, or some humanities discipline. And more power to them -- good for them, to have taken up ICT, but nevertheless this means that their computer science background is thin. This doesn’t typically mean they are opposed to the idea of computer science as a discipline, at least at an elementary level, but it means that they need our help to teach it. The big challenge at the moment that CAS is working up to is trying to train the ICT teachers of the nation and give them the information to do exactly that. Every school and secondary school has at least 1 ICT teacher. There are 30,000 primary schools, and if they want to teach some elementary knowledge in primary school they are going to have to teach computing as well in the same way that they do science -- and this is a big task. How focused is CAS on the gender gap of women in IT? How far do you feel that greater inclusion something is important to tackle at school age? I think that when it comes to the gender gap if you don’t tackle it at school age it becomes much more difficult to tackle it later, because that’s when children’s assumptions and stereotypes about the way they live are formed. Stereotypes is a very negative word, but as we grow up as individuals we form beliefs about the world -- such as that cars are hard, and you shouldn’t walk in front of them. Lots of these beliefs make sense, and we should gain them, but we also gain beliefs about what men and women can and should do, and we can end up with quite negative gender stereotypes. Computer science gets thought of as something that socially challenged male geeks might study at university, and they should do so out of sight. But if we were to teach computer science the same we teach other sciences, starting at primary school, well before puberty, before girls start to think of themselves as girl and boys think of themselves as boyish, then maybe there’s a chance we can get girls hooked on the thrill of computing before they get hammered with the stereotype. Then they stand a better chance of resisting it, and saying “I can do this, there’s nothing male about this. I’m really quite good at it already”. You were involved with the book Cybernauts Awake!: Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers, Information Technology and the Internet . How far do you think that computing in schools should include the Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers and the Internet? I’m convinced that you can’t teach science or engineering of any kind in a way divorced from its impact on the world. If you do Physics, you can learn about Newton’s laws of Motion -- and those are facts. Phyiscs and Engineering have a very big impact on the world that we live in. The answers that you might come up with in computing aren’t very cut-and-dry, I wouldn’t want to teach “This is the right answer to the impact of science on the world we live in” but I want children to have a very lively awareness that as scientists and engineers every decision we make has consequences on people. That applies no less in the digital world than it does in the engineering or chemical world. I don’t want teach a monoculture of particular answers to moral questions, but I would like children to have a very lively awareness of the consequences of their choices, and have experience of debating those consequences. I’d also like children to have a lively awareness of their spiritual lives, and have experience of debating those, too -- these two worlds may collide, because moral choices and spiritual choices are not orthogonal, the can overlap. The Computing At School Working Group (CAS) is a grassroots organisation of volunteers that aims to promote the teaching of Computing at school. To get involved, visit http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ or follow CompAtSch on Twitter.