This week, Microsoft New Zealand released a whitepaper entitled Youth, Technology & Disruption that examines the situation young people face in New Zealand when it comes to education and future work opportunities.
There are a number of points in the whitepaper and you can read the original copy by clicking here, with Managing Director of Microsoft NZ Barrie Sheers drawing attention to the following three:
- Microsoft believes all students must be taught tech skills and have an opportunity to learn computational thinking.
- Microsoft have called on the government to urgently make the necessary investments to achieve this – and to ensure that no students are left behind.
- Microsoft also want to see greater industry involvement with government officials to ensure what students are taught reflects what the industry needs.
Whilst I work for Microsoft now, my previous role was as the Director of ICT at an Independent School in New Zealand so I was very interested to read this paper in detail. I went over it and made a number of highlighter marks and you can see my own take on what stood out by clicking here.
The paper rightly touched on the teacher shortage in the area of Digital Technologies curriculum in New Zealand, but also the need to up-skill existing teachers in other curriculum areas to be able to teach computational thinking skills. In my visits to schools over the last two weeks I’ve already come across two secondary schools that were either already teaching this, or had firm plans to have a course on computational thinking for 2017. The whitepaper defines computational thinking as:
Computational thinking is about looking at a problem and knowing how to utilise a computer help solve it. It is a two step process:
- First, we think about the steps needed to solve the a problem
- Second, we use technical skills to get the computer working on the problem
The whitepaper highlights the role that technology is playing as a disruptive influence in all areas of life, accelerating the pace of change like never before. I know a number of schools invested significantly in the cost of sending staff to the Singularity University NZ Summit held in Christchurch in November 2016 .