There are a lot of great conclusions in this report and I think many Computing Science groups within Universities would welcome an even greater opportunity to work with schools and help here. Across the UK many computing departments are trying to help. As an example at the University of Northampton:
- We are involved in the organising team between a coding competition that started locally for Northamptonshire but has grown outside of the county. Like many universities we working organisations such as Code Club, working to get staff and students as volunteers. This brings mutual benefits including greater employability skill development.
- One member is an active participant, in a Computing at School activities such as the weekly twitter chat #caschat, including guest hosting, - because they want to help if they can.
- Members of the computing team have even co-written (with those with experience in teaching in school) a chapter within a book on teaching computing in primary schools (e.g chapter 3 of Teaching Computing Unplugged in Primary Schools).
- Running projects where simple robots are built in schools or provided them to schools to share ideas.
- Recently, a successful bid in this area was submitted that was strengthening the links with a local school, running a VR project in the school but by working and visiting the University, who is the other partner.
Can we do more? Yes, and please ask us. I know I want to work meaningfully with schools and authorities, but there are other reasons.
- We like our subject: Computing lecturers like their subject and have skills, insights from research, consultancy and industry.
- Recruitment: A slightly more mercenary one, is we want to have students coming through University that are even more engaged in computing.
Chapter 5 in the 'After the Reboot: computing education in UK schools' is concerned with improving computing education through research. This is an area that Computing departments can certainly help with greater collaboration with Education departments - let do this. The report, rightly points out that all of the research in computing education has been around university-level teaching (myself and many of my colleagues have published in this area). So let us get together and see how the insights we have gained can be applied in schools and equally importantly how insights gained from schools can used to inform university teaching. This is not a one way relationship, I believe we can all learn from each other. In the report, in the context of Educational researchers, "Teachers can have insights that researchers may not have", I couldn't agree more but perhaps this should also include those of us who are interested in how Computing is taught in Higher Education and allow the discussion to flow in these directions as well. Let us all learn from each other, I have learnt a lot from talking to teachers on how they teach computing.
The report also highlights "Currently, there are few incentives or opportunities for those in taught higher education courses in computer science to adopt a more interdisciplinary position." Though this a generalisation, and may apply to some institutions more than others; personally I believe greater interdisciplinary understanding would benefit the employability of computing students; so let us start then with Computing and Education producing solutions to real problem and providing a potential social good at the same time.
I think there is a potential bright collaborative future in which schools and computing departments team up to address their common goals - we want student's knowledge and experience of computational thinking, what every educational level, to be enhanced. Let us do this together.
All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon
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