Coding – The Lost Generation

If you were born in the eighties, you’re part of a sandwich generation that missed out on coding education. But it’s never too late to learn…
You can tell a person’s age by their first memories of computing. For some, it involved the wondrously slick world unveiled in 1994 by Sony’s PlayStation. Others fondly remember the thrill of inserting a floppy disc into their brand new home PC. However, people of a slightly more mature vintage may have cut their teeth hunched over magazines full of coding instructions, laboriously typing INKEY$ and GO TOs into a self-written program that could tell the time or display “I am a muppet” two hundred times on the screen. It seemed cutting edge at the time.
Passive Consumption
Today’s young adults are more likely to passively consume computer products than actively create them. For every Dong Nguyen, there are thousands of people content to trawl the Google Play store in search of pre-prepared offerings. However, this general ignorance sits poorly with the DIY ethos of open source programming and collaborative problem-solving.
National Curriculum
In an attempt to inspire future generations, coding is being added to the British school curriculum to build upon the nation’s globally-admired reputation for software innovation. Computer programming is already one of the world’s biggest growth industries, supporting millions of jobs in the creative industries and infiltrating everything from web-enabled fridges to smart bathroom scales. Its importance as we move towards an always-online, app-driven future is only going to increase.
The Coding Gap
This headlong race towards a digital future will leave today’s twenty and thirty-somethings effectively stranded between the BASIC fluency of their parents and the app creating skills of their children. Employers are increasingly looking for IT skills almost irrespective of the job being applied for, and our lives are inexorably becoming ever-more digitally driven. People more familiar with plugging in a Gameboy cartridge than creating a gaming plugin are slowly being left behind, as the world advances without them.
Carpe Coding
A common misconception about computer coding is that you effectively have to be an IT expert from the outset.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Colleges around the world offer certificate and diploma-level courses in subjects like software development, with entry criteria often requiring nothing more than school qualifications. These courses gradually introduce the concepts behind computing and software until students find themselves entering lines of code almost without realising it. Coding languages like C++ are effectively written in English anyway, making them easy to translate and understand for English speakers.
HTML offers a good starting point, since this is many people’s first unwitting exposure to a structured syntax. Hyper Text Markup Language regulates how websites display their content, along with sister languages like PHP. Their English origins mean subjects like HTML can be taught through home study courses or at evening classes. Students are often amazed how this new knowledge informs their web browsing and online activities, from troubleshooting IT issues to understanding the internet’s acronym-fuelled jargon.
With pleasing circularity, today’s programming experts have started creating apps that allow children to learn how to code for themselves. While the likes of ScratchJr might be a bit juvenile for our lost generations of passive consumers, there’s always technology like the Raspberry Pi. This credit card-sized computer was created with the purpose of enabling all ages to explore computing and to learn programming languages like Scratch and Python.