During the weekend I stumbled across code.org, an organisation
making coding opportunities more available to everyone through inventive tasks
and games. The goal is to get people to try at least an hour of coding to
broaden their understanding of computer science, and see if they could develop
their skills further. The cause has impressed me greatly. I’m of the belief
that teaching people to code is more important than many other aspects of our
outdated education programme, which is currently failing the future generation
by not ensuring their success for an increasingly digital future.
Preparing our children for the future in this way only
serves to benefit us and our prosperity henceforth. I have talked about this previously
and still believe we can be doing more to fill the ‘digital skills gap’. The
language of the world today is digital, and it seems to me that no one is
better equipped to take on the challenges of developing digital and internet
technologies than our
young people, who have spent their lives growing up and understanding these
technologies as an integral part of their lives.
The Current State of
the Technology Sector
The fractious nature of our educational system in this
regard is similar to our Technology sector. Web design Plymouth is no longer the
same as Web design South Manchester,
as our online services are becoming highly localised and divided like
franchises of a larger cooperation built to appeal to targeted areas, yet still
selling exactly the same thing.
It also completely reflects the current situation in my
hometown of Brighton (frequently dubbed Silicon Beach) as a hub of growing
digital based businesses. Shouldn’t it be the case that the entire country is jumping
on the benefits of a growing technology sector? I’ve had this conversation with
many others before, and been told it only serves to highlight my ignorance on
the matter as ‘there are plenty of growing consumer markets beyond technology
that being developed in other parts of the country’. This may be the case, but
Technology is something we should be focusing many of our efforts on in all parts of the UK.
The Future of the
Digital Market
The digital market is no longer niche. The everyday adoption
of the internet, social media, and consumer technologies has changed the way we
interact with modern technology, and completely changed our priorities for the
way we use it. The future of these technologies ultimately depends upon on how
developers educate younger people.
An emerging problematic consensus appears to be that
technologies evolve
so rapidly that learning something essential this year could be made irrelevant
four years later. In the space of two Olympic Games we’ve had the iPhone and
then the iPad, two consumer electronics that sparked a revolution in personal
computing. Who can begin to guess where electronics or web development will be
in the years coming. Even the internet is still in its infancy at this point,
but in just 20 years it has become the greatest cultural touchstone on the
planet.
It’s my belief that an industry so young provides nothing
but opportunity for our younger people, all of which have been given the chance
to leave their mark and influence the growth of digital technologies.
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