In the Fall the Ontario government was running a consultation process into education. The process was relatively wide open… anyone could e-mail a document to the government as part of this process. I really want to see coding, computational thinking and computer science as part of the standard curriculum for all kinds of reasons… job growth in the ICT sector is explosive, the jobs are relatively good income jobs, and yet, equality of opportunity in the ICT sector is poor. Students don’t get exposure to coding in elementary school in the standard curriculum, and in many secondary schools they cannot take it as an elective either. I’ve always romanticized education as the great equalizer… even if it’s imperfect, it can level the playing field and give everyone a shot… and given how important coding has become as a career path, it’s important that this opportunity is equally available too.
Myself and others working or previously working in education worked on a joint proposal for the curriculum consultation that we hosted at codeontario.ca. We kept the proposal to a “2 pager” with the idea of keeping it consumable, high-level and focused on the broad “asks”. We then solicited as many endorsements from industry, public, non-profit and education sectors as possible. All together we had 1,000 signatures in one form or another, including some high profile endorsements.
It was formally endorsed by Google Canada and IBM Canada, and from leaders of some of the fastest growing and largest startups in the province like John Baker of D2L (Desire2Learn), Allen Lau of Wattpad, Alexander Peters of Prodigy Game, and many more. It got almost unanimous endorsement from the regional innovation centre executive directors, as 14 of 17 of them endorsed it, including Innovation Factory, Communitech and MarsDD. These centres are provincially funded and have a mandate to grow the technology sector, and so they hopefully added some weight to the proposal. On the education side it was endorsed by Engineering Deans at a majority of Universities in Ontario, College Executives including Mohawk President Ron McKerlie, Directors of Education and Trustees across the province. It was also endorsed by important non-profits in the education sector, key IT professional organizations, and Chamber of Commerce CEOs across the province.
I’m really happy about how far it got out there! But did it work, or at least, help convince the government they need to move on computational thinking and coding skills in the curriculum? It’s hard to say… the government press release addressing their plans for education had this to say:
“The strategy will also include revised Business Studies and Computer Studies curricula focused on developing job skills such as entrepreneurial skills, computational thinking and coding. In 2019-20 we will begin research and benchmarking against other jurisdictions as a foundation for revisions to these curricula. “
Taking time to study what other jurisdictions are doing before revising our own curriculum makes sense to me. I hope the government will keep this commitment and move quickly.