Simon Peyton Jones: the spark that ignited a revolution
EDITOR’S NOTE: Coding in the classroom has leapt to the forefront of global discussions of curriculum for the 21st century as schools in England have incorporated the language behind computers into classroom instruction through all grades and many other countries and American states have stepped up coding in their classroom curriculums. This third segment of a multi-part series explores how coding came to be incorporated in English classrooms at every grade level and what lessons their experiences may hold for Ontario and Canada.
MANITOULIN—The Expositor caught up with the man who is largely credited with being the catalyst for what has become a growing global phenomenon by telephone at his Microsoft Research office in Cambridge, England.
Simon Peyton Jones is a principal researcher at Microsoft and for the past 35-plus years computer science has been his life, having spent two years in industry, seven years as a lecturer at University College London and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.
He recalls the moment he first realized a critical lack in his children’s education.
“I was sitting down at the dinner table, as one is wont to do as a parent, asking them what they did that day in school,” he said. His children’s interactions with computers was bounded by the practical vocational approach that was then all the rage in English schools. That approach is labeled ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and focused on the practical use of programs and computer hardware to accomplish tasks, but left students with little to no understanding of what lay beneath those tools. “The topic that I had found so fascinating all of my life, computer science, was really not in the educational system at all.”
Mr. Peyton Jones noted that had be been a biologist or a physicist he would have been able to discern a connection to the underlying theories of the discipline with what his children were learning in the classroom. Students were learning how to push buttons and click icons to accomplish a task, but as to what lay behind those buttons and mouse clicks? Well it was all just magic, wasn’t it?
If there is an anathema to a scientist practicing in any discipline, it is magical thinking. So he set about to try and change things. No small task when one is faced with the immense inertia created by the mass of a national, or provincial, education system—but with the launch of the new English curriculum he can claim no small success for his efforts.
Mr. Peyton Jones laughs when he is asked how it feels to have launched an educational revolution. “Like all people to whom these things are attributed, it only happened because a lot of other people were involved,” he said, noting that the time was right for a change to happen. “You might say we struck a spark in a room full of gunpowder.”
“There was really nobody who was happy with the status quo,” he said. The lack of a foundational base on which to build the vocational learning would hardly have been accepted in any other discipline. He pointed out that even though the ICT curriculum had been designed to meet the needs of business, with an eye to creating graduates with the skills needed for the information-based economy, it ultimately fell short due to the lack of that foundational base. “It was all about things that other people had made and how to use it.”
The insight into how those tools were made, the intellectual underpinnings that led to their design, was lacking. “Even Microsoft wasn’t happy with just teaching students how to use Word (the company’s flagship word processing software).
When computers first came into the ken of most of the public, most people had little understanding of personal computers, but in today’s classroom children not only have been highly exposed to the technology, they literally have it in the palm of their hands with today’s smart phones.
So a curriculum that was based on teaching students how to do what they were already very familiar with was a perfect recipe for de-motivation. Not only that, but because the ICT approach in English classrooms concentrated on learning the fundamentals, quite literally by rote, students could repeat the tests and coursework until they got it right.
The result was a near 100 percent success rate in meeting the benchmarks and teachers who were buried under mounds of marking and course papers. Given enough times at bat, “even poorly motivated students could succeed,” he said. “It became a cash cow for schools.”
For many disciplines there are foundational aspects that do not change over time, unlike software and computer hardware that flickers through versions as fast as the consumer business cycle can turn.
“There are enduring theories, like Newton’s Law, that don’t change with the application of new technology,” he pointed out, “and enduring principles, like the scientific method.” Those underlying foundations lie beneath most disciplines such as science and mathematics.
Mr. Peyton Jones reached out to other like-minded people in his immediate circle, and a small working group, Computing at School (CAS), was created. “We started with four members in 2007,” said Mr. Peyton Jones. “There are now 22,000 members of a very vibrant community.” Mr. Peyton Jones estimates that three quarters of that membership are teachers.
The mission of CAS is to “provide leadership and strategic guidance to all those involved in computing education in schools, with a significant but not exclusive focus on the computer science theme within the wider computing curriculum. Excellence in the teaching of computing can only be made by teachers through the way they deliver the skills, knowledge, understanding and attitudes associated with the curriculum. Through the participation of the wider community we seek to support and empower each other in an inclusive and self-sustaining body so that each child has the opportunity of an outstanding computer science education. CAS achieves this by supporting and promoting all those individuals, partner organisations, companies, and university departments who wish to run CAS regional hubs, put on CPD courses, generate teaching resources etc. that support the computing curriculum.”
Although CAS is largely volunteer driven, Mr. Peyton Jones points out that “you need some glue” to hold the effort together, and that glue was provided by a relatively modest grant of one million pounds from the government. To put that in perspective, notes the computer science advocate, “there are about 100,000 teachers in England, so that amounts to about 10 pounds a school teacher.”
But that “oil” has played a very important role in leveraging the private sector efforts to provide the training and support tools for teachers.
The new English curriculum document is remarkably brief, comprising just two double-sided pages of type—unthinkably brief where usual government documents are concerned, but it is in its succinct brevity that the strength of the document lies, leveraging the creativity and initiative of individual schools and their teachers to meet the challenges inherent in the new approach.
Mr. Peyton Jones was interviewed for a feature segment on CBC’s The National that ran at the end of August 2015 in which he was asked about the inquiries he has been receiving from around the world about the new curriculum. He noted in the interview that he has been receiving calls from across the globe. “Italy, Kenya, Sweden…” the list goes on. The interviewer asks how many calls from Canada? “I think you are the first,” he admits.
So has he received many calls since that interview? Mr. Peyton Jones pauses for a moment. He has received an inquiry from a Nova Scotia delegation to an educational conference taking place this week in England, but The Expositor call is the third.
The CAS resources are online, and membership is open to anyone who wishes to sign up, but the core of the organization is in England. There are no latent visions of imperialism in the offing, however. “No, no, don’t want to build an empire,” he laughs, but he does add that adopting the CAS ‘brand’ would be beneficial to anyone looking to start the kind of grassroots organization in Canada or any other country for that matter. “Rather than CAS expand abroad, you could brand CAS Canada,” he suggests. “There is free access to our resources.”
The CAS website can be found at www.computingatschool.org.uk and Mr. Peyton Jones notes their resources are available at community.computingatschool.org.uk/resources/3084.
