Put children's digital creativity in focus every week!

Digitization Skills supply
This week, on October 11-17, the European Commission has declared "EU Code Week", and around Europe activities are taking place with the ambition to highlight the creative aspect of programming. In Sweden, the Academedia group, through the NTI high school and its enthusiast Christine Johnsson, has taken the lead in organizing a large number of sessions where children have the opportunity to try out and learn coding in various forms (read about the activities here). Also start-ups Code Center offers a wide range of activities.

In Sweden, as in the rest of Europe, we otherwise struggle with the challenge that knowledge of how code-based systems work is largely absent from school curricula, despite it being so fundamental to our modern society where computers are part of so much of what we surround ourselves with and depend on in our everyday lives. School students are taught how to make objects from wood, metal and textiles, how photosynthesis works and how light is divided into color spectra, but most go through primary school without ever learning about concepts like algorithms and iteration.

Fortunately, initiatives are under way to correct this anomaly. In its interim report(SOU 2014:13), the Digitization Commission proposed that programming become a compulsory element in school, and SKL's national forum for school digitization, which includes IT&Telekomföretagen, also has this on its agenda as they are now chiseling out a national strategy in the area.

For those of us pushing the issue, there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to children and coding:

  • Don't forget the girls! There are still too many examples where coding interest is steered towards things that most boys are interested in, like action-based computer games.
  • Don't just try to fascinate with technology itself! As important as algorithms, iterations and objects are, they are just a means to an end for what fascinates both boys and girls: the creative digital solutions you can create. Programming is creativity!
  • Don't forget to keep young people interested beyond the critical teenage years! Studies show that children, regardless of gender, have a natural curiosity about technology from the start, but many lose it by the age of 11-12. This is when identity building begins, and status and relationships become infinitely more important than technical knowledge.

Initiatives like Code Week are good and can make a big difference, but a big responsibility lies with us in the industry. We need to show that everything that both boys and girls dream of in terms of status and relationships is possible to achieve when working with digital services and solutions. The best way to do this is to demonstrate this in practice to teenagers. Like the Next Up competition, which gives 8th graders the chance to find their own digital talent by working for a semester on real-life cases commissioned by real IT companies and, most importantly, meeting people who are working with IT in different ways and changing the world through it.