All about Isaac Asimov, Wikipedia, here
Bouncing around the Web in the first week of January were snippets from a 1964 article in the New York Times by Isaac Asimov. ( You can read the article here: Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014 ).
The famous science-fiction writer had imagined what the world would be like in 50 years’ time. One of his unsuccessful predictions for 2014 was this one:
‘All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology, will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran” (from “formula translation”).’
To Asimov, it must have seemed like a safe extrapolation. Computers were starting to appear in schools, and high school students were already learning FORTRAN. It seemed likely that computers would take over more and more human tasks in the next 50 years. It also seemed likely that computers would be doing tasks that humans couldn’t imagine in 1964. Obviously, we’d need what Asimov called ‘machine tenders’: people who understood the technology and could write the programs. If computers were going to be everywhere, their programmers would need to be everywhere, too, so they could write, improve, rebuild, repair, replace and dream the code that ran the everywhere machines.
It didn’t happen.
In fact, it didn’t happen in a very big way. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, and I’m no cultural studies wizard who can explain why Asimov got it wrong. Maybe it’s because when computers became personal devices in the 1980s, the mass marketers decided to sell magic boxes. You didn’t have to know how your computer worked, either mechanically or electronically or programmatically. You just typed on keys and clicked a mouse button, and magic happened inside the box. That’s still the case, except that now you can also swish your fingers over a touch screen, to make the magic.
Before the magic boxes appeared, there was at least an awareness of code. Or so I remember. I was one of the students Asimov had in mind: I learned the basics of FORTRAN in high school 53 years ago. When I came to Tasmania in 1973, the first Tasmanian I met was a 16-year-old girl who was programming ‘turtle’ robots at Elizabeth College in Hobart. My first forestry job, at Smithton in the 1970s, had me programming a Texas Instruments calculator so I didn’t have to process tree measurements by hand.
I’m retired now and a boring old fart, but I still code. I write websites from scratch in HTML, CSS and Javascript, and I write simple programs for my computer to do routine jobs, and to do non-routine jobs in ways faster and simpler than is possible with currently available software.
Which means there’s a giant skills gap between me and most Tasmanian high school students. Their ‘ICT education’ begins and ends with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint, thanks in part to a cosy arrangement between our State government and an American multinational ( My Government is software-stupid ).
The good news is that there are plans to close the gap. A worldwide movement aims to put coding into schools, one of its most active promoters being the code.org organisation ( here). Even better, the draft technology component of the Australian Curriculum expects ‘visual’ programming to be taught in primary schools, and general-purpose programming (real code) in high schools ( search for Draft revised Australian Curriculum Technologies.pdf for a copy ).
The bad news is that the gap isn’t going to close soon, and I suspect the closing will be slower in Tasmania than in mainland States. Our Education Department, always on the lookout for new ways to excuse the State’s dismal performance in school learning, will probably do nothing on the pretext that ‘the community’ only needs students with Word/Excel/PowerPoint/browser competence. We already know that the ‘Hour of Code’ activities in December’s Computer Science Education Week ( here ) were resolutely ignored in almost every Tasmanian school.
To be fair, those schools are staffed by teachers who weren’t taught coding by teachers who weren’t taught coding. We’ve missed a couple of generations since Asimov made his prediction.
• Interview with a coder: Meet Lyndsey Scott, The Victoria’s Secret Model Who Codes In Her Free Time
Dr Robert Mesibov is Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and School of Agricultural Science, University of Tasmania.
