This fall, the entire British school system will embrace computer science.
The UK is the first G8 country to include computer science education in its national curriculum, and the move could serve as a test case for so many other nations across the globe, including the United States. As computing comes to dominate our world, programming skills are more valuable than ever, but even the U.S.–the center of the technology universe–is still struggling to bring coding into the classroom. Part of the problem is that, before students learn how to code, their teachers must learn too. Pulling all that off is a massive endeavor.
>Part of the problem is that, before students learn how to code, their teachers must learn too.
That's why many UK schools are turning to Codecademy, a three-year-old startup based in New York City. Codecademy offers free coding classes over the internet in a variety of programming languages, and more than a 1,000 British schools are now leaning on its service as they prepare for the arrival of new curriculum.
Today, the startup opened an office in London–its first international operation–to spread its reach even further into British classrooms. But the Codecademy vision extends beyond Britain. The company's products are already used in tens of thousands of after-school programs around the United States. Today, it also announced that it's launching a program to bring Codecademy to schools in Estonia, which has already added coding education to its national curriculum, as well the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which will use Codecademy in 30 schools this year, before expanding it throughout the school system next year.
CEO Zach Sims hopes that countries across the globe will follow Britain's lead, and that just might happen. Codecademy's lessons are completely free. "The more people who are learning," he says, "the better it is for the company."
The UK's new coding push was years in the making. The movement to bring computer science into the classroom was spearheaded largely by the local tech community, says British education minister Elizabeth Truss, and this grassroots effort came to head just as the country was overhauling its national curriculum.
In 2012, under pressure from the non-profit group Computing at School, a venerable fellowship of scientists called The Royal Society, and even Google chairman Eric Schmidt, the government decided it needed to act, and it asked Computing at School to draft a sample curriculum for computer science. It was intentionally brief, laying out the skills students would be expected to learn, but allowing the schools to decide how those skills would be taught. "We think that when teachers own the work they’re doing, and they have decision making power over how to teach a subject, that is much more effective," Truss says.
>'We think that when teachers own the work they’re doing, and they have decision making power over how to teach a subject, that is much more effective.'
That presented a huge opportunity for Codecademy. Suddenly, thousands of schools were tasked with introducing an entirely new subject matter into the classroom, one that even many teachers weren't familiar with. Late last year, the Department for Education announced it was launching 800 local support groups in partnership with Computing at School to train some 20,000 teachers in the new curriculum (1). The idea was that the first set of trained teachers would become "master teachers," who would then pass their new knowledge on to other teachers at other schools. It's a massive undertaking, and Simon Peyton Jones, the driving force behind Computing at School, believed Codecademy could help it scale.
"We have a curriculum that works along with the standards that were set by the government," says Codecademy CEO Sims. "It made it easy to shift a lot of the burden of teaching the material onto a platform that’s already been vetted."
Today, Codecademy's platform is a complement to Computing at School's in-person training sessions, allowing remote teachers to take lessons online, and allowing teachers who learn in person to continue their education after the training is over. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 schools have signed up to bring Codecademy into the classroom come fall. To accommodate this new population of users, Codecademy has developed sample lesson plans for teachers and is even working on a free dashboard where teachers can track student progress.
"We look at this as a really good opportunity to look at learning at scale," Sims says. And while the company isn't making any money on this work (and doesn't plan to any time soon), Sims says Codecademy still has a lot to gain from this endeavor. "It uses a lot of stuff that’s already on the site. It promotes the work of people who have already created content on the site," he says, "and it extends to new audiences that might not have had access to it before."
Back home in the States, things have not been so easy for Codecademy. As Sims put it, convincing school systems to integrate computer science education into the curriculum is "like a street war." That's because, unlike in the UK, in the United States, it's the states and school districts, not the federal government, that control curriculums. "First, we have to convince people why they should teach programming in the first place," Sims says. "Then one person buys in, then you need a district to buy in. It’s just a mess."
>Convincing school systems to integrate computer science education into the curriculum is 'like a street war.'
Instead, Codecademy, members of the tech community, and other groups like Code.org are taking a grassroots approach to the problem. Just this month, dozens of Silicon Valley's finest, including Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, wrote to California Governor Jerry Brown, asking for a meeting to discuss bringing computer science education to California. Meanwhile, as The New York Times recently reported, some 20,000 teachers across the country have started teaching coding lessons in schools since December, according to Code.org. And some cities, like New York and Chicago, are even beginning to roll out coding classes in select schools this fall.
Codecademy, for one, has developed its own "class in a box," which it mails to teachers, complete with workbooks and other materials that teachers can use along with Codecademy's online resources. Today, Sims says, tens of thousands of teachers are using this product to start after school programs. This, he says, is a bottom up strategy to get computer science into schools. "I think that’s what the internet is for," Sims says. "It’s for bottom up innovation, instead of top down."
If the triumph of the grassroots movement in the UK is any indication, Sims might be right. Granted, it might take a bit longer, given the distributed nature of the United States school system. But as Codecademy and others like it continue to set examples at home and abroad of what large scale computing education should look like, school systems may be more willing to give it a try. And when they do, the impact that could have on the next generation of students could be big. As Jones put it: "It feels like a once in a generation chance to make a real, discrete shift in what we teach our children."
1. Correction 10:40 EST 05/22/14 An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to the Department for Education as the Department of Education.
