I feel a contentious post coming on ...
The other day I was reading my NZACDITT emails and was offered a link to this page:
http://www.3news.co.nz/Lecturer-looking-to-push-girls-into-IT/tabid/412/articleID/351145/Default.aspx
The article got me thinking (once again) about the advice I should give my students with regard to the path they should take upon leaving school. Last year I had a small class of seven students taking digital technologies. They were a lovely bunch of girls and most loved the subject and put in a lot of effort. I do not teach programming because it's not supported by senior management in my school at present (this could be the subject of a different post). Instead the girls do digital media and digital information, learning HTML, CSS and PHP. I figure the PHP is a good intro to some of the basics of programming - they need to use loops, conditions, variables, arrays, etc and they need to develop algorithms to produce outcomes. Out of my seven students who left last year, four went on to do computer science at university. I considered this quite a coup.
I have kept in touch with three of the girls and one of them came to visit on the last day of Term 2. She told me she'd dropped computer science. This is a girl who did Level 3 calculus and physics, handled PHP comfortably, created beautiful and functional websites, set herself high standards, had a passion for pushing to see just what she could achieve with code, and generally looked to have a bright future somewhere in the IT industry. I believe she still does have a bright future in the IT industry. She is continuing with Information Systems at university but in her words "Computer science is boring. All you do is write code".
So here's where the contentious bit comes in ...
There is still going to be a limit on the girls we can attract into IT via the programming route. It's just not everyone's cup of tea. And it should not be the deciding factor in defining who should be getting the jobs. I totally believe that learning to code is an incredibly useful way of exercising the mind and that it wouldn't hurt us to include it in the curriculum for everyone at some stage because it will open doors for kids who never knew they had it in them. And among those kids will be the code-cutters of the future. But it should not be the only entree to the world of IT.
I, for one, want to know what pathways I should be recommending for my students. Sure, some of them will thrive on computer science and will end up filling those much needed positions out there in the real world. But there are so many other roles that my girls could be aiming for - project managers, database administrators, testers, business analysts, systems engineers, marketers ... the list is endless (and I'm deliberately ignoring the creative/design side of things here). What are the pathways into these careers - surely not through doing a computer science degree?
Of all people I should be in as good a position as any to talk about pathways into IT. I'm an ex systems engineer (albeit only for a short time before I had kids) who got my break joining IBM with my earth science degree back in the early '80s. I did all my training in-house (including a bit of Cobol programming) and discovered my love for things techy by hanging out with the SEs when I was an administrator. My partner is a senior project manager who started as a bank clerk and moved across into IT. Neither of us has a computer science degree, and neither of us will ever get one, but we both had/have successful careers in IT. I fully understand that times have changed but there are still vast tracts of IT (all appearing in the ICT Connect Roadshow presentations) that are not going to be accessed with a computer science degree.
I'm a bit out of touch with the real world now, so what I want to know is "what should I be recommending my students do upon leaving school?" Obviously some of them will thrive on CS at university - but I don't want the IT world to miss out on the skills and passion of those for whom cutting code is just not their bag.
Yikes - this is just too long - sorry. If anyone does read it I'll be amazed. I've been thinking of tweeting the link because I really would love some comments and advice. Oh well - here goes ...
