By chance I came across this e-petition to the Department of Education. I have been following Anna Debenham’s (@anna_debenham) personal campaign to get a younger generation of web designers and coders excited about the future of web and technology.
Start teaching coding as a part of the curriculum in Yr 5. If it can be introduced as a part of the central curriculum in Year 5, then by the time those kids are drawn up through the education system, there would be far less of a disparity between the sexes – and maybe even an increased number of young people with an ability to manipulate open data, relate to code and challenge each other to design and build the digital products that we have not even begun to imagine. Year 8 is too late, we are losing the female coders and we need this generation to help us code a better country.
It’s a fair argument, that youngsters lose interest; particularly females, in web design and technology. But the industry today has plenty of examples; such as Anna and the likes of Sarah Parmenter (@sazzy), of professional web designers who are particularly successful in this male dominated profession.
If you would like to see a better curriculum for Yr 5’s + then the petition is open until September 2012. We need at least 100,000 signees in order to make a difference, it would be amazing and a testiment to our forward thinking for the future of web design and technology in the UK if this petition criteria was met far in advance of the closing date.
If you would like to get behind this most important petition for the next generation, you can sign the official petition from Direct.gov here: http://ian.tl/19
Posted On: Monday, September 12th, 2011 @ 6:27 pm by Ian Tearle
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