Develop Conference: 'We now have at least a ten year gap in teaching Computer Science in the UK', says David Braben
Poor education for aspiring developers and programmers in the UK is a perennial problem for the games industry, says David Braben.
Speaking at the Develop in Brighton conference, the Frontier CEO and Raspberry Pi foundation trustee said that often when his studio went out to find new employees, there weren't many quality and well-trained developers applying.
He highlighted a general trend in University applications for Computer Science, which dipped significantly after a peak in 2001 by 50 per cent by 2005/6.
"We were looking to hire people at Frontier. It’s is a perennial problem in this industry, we weren’t getting good people applying.
"In 2001 there was a real drop off in the number of applicants to Universities for Computer Science, some of them were as high as a factor of four in drop-offs. And that’s against a background of the government trying to get more people into university, so it’s actually worse than that.
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"Applicants peaked in 2001, and by 2005/6 there was more than a 50% drop off."
Braben went on to say that with ICT usurping Computer Science in schools, students were now turned off by getting into the programming industry, and said many found the course dull.
He added that with the dropping of Computer Science, the UK now has at least a ten-year skills gap, which could be damaging for the country's future business prospects.
"ICT teachers tend to be staff who aren’t actually trained in the subject, such as English or history tutors," he said.
"We now have at least a ten-year gap in Computer Science education. From a school’s point of view we haven’t been teaching computer science in the UK for ten years, and that is really damaging.
"Before this gap we had Computer Science in schools teaching algorithms. It engaged the kids, it was great. The kids got excited about it and there was a proper engagement.
"It may have seemed dull at the time, but it’s nothing compared to ICT today."
When I was in school in the 1990's, I was actively discouraged from engaging in Computer Science. The teachers kept telling myself how hard a subject it was, and kept trying to shovel myself into doing I.T., as if knowing how to use a word processor was going to help myself in knowing how to program in the likes of C++.
It seems the recent turnaround is too little too late. However, I would ask any employer that instead of looking on course titles on CVs to instead look at an applicants showreel or portfolio, as that will always give a better idea of the skills of the applicant.
I recently visited a secondary school's open day and had a chat with the ICT dept. The individual I spoke to was rather dimissive of Michael Grove and his push to introduce Computer Science back into the classroom stating their opinion that Mr Grove does not have a clue. Only when I mentioned that the push was in fact supported by industry leaders like Ian Livingstone and David Braben did they start to listen.
The difficulty traditional ICT depts are facing is that a good proportional of them have no commercial digital content creation or programming experience and hence asking the same people to bring about essentially a revolution in thinking and skills is a sure way to ensure a total cockup happens. The government needs to ensure the schools have the funding to bring about either extra training of existing staff and/or external support from industry to help support the change. Additionally big creative studios can also help by becoming advisors or champions in their local area, to whom schools can turn to for guidance.
