Industry Practice as a Source of Potential Values for Computing Education – What Can Teachers and Pupils Learn from Industry Professionals

This study explores the potential values coming from the practices of computing industry in the UK that could be incorporated in British schools in order to improve the quality of computing education and provide a more engaging experience for pupils and encourage more young people to pursue a career in this field, thus helping to bridge the skill gap on the job market. In 2014, computer science returned to British schools after many years of absence – a change awaited by computing professionals, who criticised the previous ICT subject. The new, demanding curriculum brought a number of challenges that the education system needs to deal with: unprepared teachers, low popularity of computing among pupils and lack of established pedagogies in this field. A report by The Royal Society from 2017 highlights areas of computing education in schools that need improvements and provides recommendations, including further research in this field and providing support to teachers with the help of industry, government and non-profit organisations. Findings and suggestions of this report became the main rationale for conducting this study. An exploration of computing-specific pedagogies and educational support tools revealed a variety of both. However, what became apparent was the large number of tools for block-based programming and limited support for textual programming. This suggested a potential area of development. Further research consisted of collecting quantitative and qualitive data from several groups of people whose input was seen as valuable: computing tutors from universities, computing industry professionals and secondary computing teachers. The results coming from two surveys, conducted among computing tutors in 2014 and 2018, are in line with findings presented in “Next Gen” report and show that despite recent changes in schools the quality of computing education is still seen as low among people from higher education institutions. A survey with computing professionals working in the industry helps to understand their original motivation to learn computer science, explores their current learning and problem-solving habits, and offers some advice to schools. An analysis of #CASchat discussion on Twitter provides an insight into the world of computing educators, focusing on problems with transferring to text-based programming, ways to overcome them, as well as educators’ views on the practice of industry as a potential source of values for schools. Finally, a series of semi-structured interviews with computing teachers from secondary schools in Northamptonshire has allowed the researcher to understand the challenges of their everyday work, see what tools and methodologies they use, and find out how much they know about industry practice and whether they see it as a source of values for computing education. Findings coming from the activities outlined above are in line with the literature and allow to identify a number of key values based on the practice of industry professionals: teamwork and collaboration, doing practical projects to solve real-life problems, using internet resources and IDEs for textual programming and problem-solving. These values should be promoted and encouraged in schools. Another direction that was investigated during this research was the experimental development of an IDE specifically designed for beginners. While a detailed description of the process and its evaluation is provided in Appendix 10, preliminary results from trials with computing students and teachers suggest significant promise for this approach in enhancing learning within computing education.