Pi Perspectives: Miles Berry (Naace)

Miles Berry is Chair of the National Association of Advisers for Computers in Education , Subject Leader for ICT Education at the University of Roehampton, and a consultant and frequent speaker and author on the future of ICT education. In this interview Miles gives us an insight into his experiences of teaching computing and the challenges faced by schools, and considers what can be done to help ensure that the Raspberry Pi is a success in education.

Can you give us an insight into how you gained your introduction to computing

I have some recollection of reading, or looking at the wonderfully evocative pictures in, Ladybird's 'The Computer' at a very early age, and of my father's Sinclair Cambridge calculator perhaps a year or two later. I was given a Commodore programmable calculator for Christmas at the age of ten, and recall typing in the keystrokes for a moon-lander game. At secondary school, a few of us were taught BASIC programming by our head of maths, and then came the ZX81 (with a wobbly RAM pack) and later a BBC Micro at home, which I recall doing some semi-serious mathematical programming on. All of which was down to a combination of interest and opportunity. How do the opportunities for young people getting into computing now differ from when you were growing up?

There are so many more opportunities now: the Internet makes it so easy for young people to learn from and with others globally, and there are some great resources and communities there for anyone wanting to learn to code; GUIs can make things more complex for coding, but graphical programming environments like Scratch and App Inventor make it easy for learners to focus on getting algorithms right rather than getting bogged down in syntax; there's a global audience, and potentially market, for the programs young people write, via open source projects, web development and mobile apps; and there are some lovely projects to encourage computing within and beyond school. On the flip side, there's now a much more pronounced distinction between end users and developers, and I fear too much ICT education in school focusses on the former.

Can you tell us about your experiences of teaching computing?

I'm fortunate in having had a lot of control over the ICT curriculum I've taught over the years, and thus it's been easy enough for me to focus, to a greater or lesser extent, on developing my students' understanding of technology as well as their skills in using it. I really don't think one can teach ICT for understanding without bringing in ideas from computer science: e-mail is a classic example — it's easy enough to tell pupils how to send and receive e-mails, but explaining about mail servers and protocols takes us well into computing territory and provides some schema for what's going on behind the scenes. There are interesting similarities and differences between teaching BBC BASIC back in my first job and BYOB Scratch in my present role — so easy to get interesting, impressive things happening with the latter, and much easier to experiment for oneself, but debugging and getting the algorithms right are still where the challenges lie for many learners. One further observation: I find many of our first year undergraduates are used to detailed instructions that having to figure things out for themselves can often be quite a challenge.

What are the challenges to increasing the quality of computing teaching in schools?

Teachers' subject knowledge is the obvious one. Far too few ICT teachers have any experience of programming or knowledge of computer science and this makes it really hard to teach computing well using traditional approaches. There are interesting schemes around for teachers to be mentored by software developers and for targeted training from a number of university computing departments, and it's easy enough for teachers to learn some computing themselves, perhaps using online resources such as Codecademy , udacity or Stanford's free CS classes .

Of course, teachers don't have to be experts in all that they teach — for computing, and much else, there's much to be gained through teachers acting as facilitators of pupils' independent learning, acting as critical friends and providing the challenge, support and encouragement needed for learners to take their own learning to the next level. For some this might be a radical change in pedagogy, but the that takes place might actually be quite a bit closer to how many of in the industries learn the software development skills they have.

What role does open source have to play in learning environments?

There's plenty of scope for open source on the 'back end' as stable, secure servers throughout the school, perhaps most obviously as a platform for some really exciting web-based applications, such as Moodle as a virtual learning environment, Wordpress for blogging, Elgg or Drupal for in-house social networking and a few niche products like Opencast Matterhorn for lecture/lesson casts, Kaltura for video streaming and Koha for the library catalogue.

Android offers an appealing open source platform for mobile app development, particularly using educationally oriented tools like App Inventor.

Open source desktops are still, I fear, a way off for most schools, even for computing courses, but it's hard to think of any proprietary applications that might be needed in school that don't have comparable, sometimes better, open source equivalents, at least outside of the education-specific marketplace. Providing teachers and learners with software that they can customise and study seems such a win for schools it continues to surprise me that so few do this.

More interesting still are what becomes possible when you start applying open source approaches to what happens inside schools — involving our 'users' in the co-development of curriculum and pedagogy is already happening, and even Michael Gove talked about an open source world and a wiki approach to the curriculum in his speech at BETT earlier this year.

How important are computer science skills in general, and to the economy?

Computational thinking has wide applications across and beyond the curriculum — it's another way of looking at situations and solving problems and provides a really useful toolkit to draw on. It's important for our economy that we do have folk going on to study computer science at university and enter the software industries, but perhaps even more important that the general population 'get' computing, in work, learning and life — I suspect the country would be in far better shape, and we'd have spent somewhat less on badly managed public and private sector IT projects if it was a majority rather than minority who understood the principles of computing.

Not all that we teach become poets or musicians, just as not all become programmers, but just as we teach children to write their own poems and compose their own music, so should we teach them to code if they're to have a rounded, liberal education fit for the third millennium. Rushkoff puts it well: 'program or be programmed'.

What opportunity do you think the Raspberry Pi presents us with?

Raspberry Pi offers a wonderful opportunity for the iPhone generation to learn to develop, rather than merely use, software themselves. The biggest potential is, I think, as a tool for independent, autonomous learning through experiment and discovery, within, but more importantly, beyond the school.

I think it's far easier for young people to get an insight into how a general purpose computer works, and indeed to start coding, with Linux on a Pi than with locked down devices like Apple's polished iOS. Given the small form factor of the Pi, I think we'll see some really interesting embedded applications, including some exciting robotics stuff, via Gertboards and similar.

The price point is crucial too, as this removes the cost barrier for computing, and means that young people wanting to experiment with computing don't need to worry about others in their family not being able to use the shared computer.

What can be done to help ensure that the Raspberry Pi is a success in education?

In school, the key thing will be not locking down these machines, leaving them open for students to play with, hack and tweak to their hearts' content, restoring to a clean boot from a fresh memory card if or when things go wrong — for some network managers, this might be quite a challenge to empower end users like this, but where else will a new generation of sys admins learn their skills?

I think it'll be useful to develop some courses and resources to go with the Pi, for teachers as much as for students, but it already looks as though the community is up for this, and I'm hopeful that we'll see young people acting as co-creators of these themselves — this has certainly been the case with Scratch , where so much of the learning that takes places is peer to peer.

It's also important that we see education in broader terms than schooling — I'm confident that much of the really innovative, creative learning that we'll see happening with the Pi will be outside of formal curricula, but that's not to say that teachers can't make use of some informal learning approaches inside the classroom too.

Will you be buying a Raspberry Pi, and if so what do you plan to do with it?

I'm somewhere on the very long waiting list, so yes, eventually, I'll be buying one. I have in mind playing around a bit with hardware interfacing, but I suspect it'll find its way sooner or later into our daughter's hands - it should be really interesting to see what she can make it do.

Thank you for your time, Miles!