CHAPTER 3

At the second annual #BCTECH Summit in March 2017, Clark announced that B.C. “is the first jurisdiction in North America to require coding in classrooms.”

But this statement was problematic. For one, it ignored the work being done in other jurisdictions, such as Chicago, New York and San Francisco, which, by 2013 had all committed to requiring coding in classrooms in the next five to 10 years. Schools in Nova Scotia have taught the basics of coding to students in kindergarten through Grade 3 since 2015.

But Clark’s quote also doesn’t accurately represent the form that coding takes in many schools across the province.

When coding was originally introduced into the curriculum, Education Minister Mike Bernier suggested to reporters that children didn’t necessarily need computers in order to learn code: “You don’t actually have to be sitting in front of a computer to learn coding. There’s lots of different ways to do that.”

NDP MLA Rob Fleming, who previously served as the party’s education critic, took objection to this in a party press release. “The minister of education actually said, with a straight face, that students don’t need computers to learn computer coding. That is like telling a kid to learn to ride a bike without a bike.”

Fleming went on to say that the $6 million allocated towards coding until 2018 wouldn’t properly cover equipment expenses. “The reality is that many schools in our province lack computer screens and some don’t even have broadband Internet service. It is essential that students get hands-on experience with up-to-date technology to properly teach coding.”

In fact, reports emerged of many schools, particularly in B.C.’s interior, that had very few or no computers at all to work with, and even if they did have computers, the internet bandwidth provided in many cases was limited.

The other element of teaching students to code came from actual human beings: the teachers. The government was ostensibly left with two options: bring in new teachers to teach the curriculum; or attempt to train the existing teachers in how to bring coding to their classrooms.

The latter option was embraced. And while the government didn’t release information as to why that was, it’s easy to see that hiring new teachers would have been a financial burden without replacing existing teachers — which wouldn’t have been popular politically.

The question of how to teach teachers, who were mired in routine, some of whom with more than 20 years of experience teaching the same thing, was addressed in the aforementioned email put together by the Ministry of Education.

As shown above, the ministry allocated 10 hours of training to enable teachers to learn about curricular changes and the implementation of new programs.

The government provided two-day workshops, allowing all 60 school districts to send two teachers to sessions in Victoria, Vancouver, Chilliwack, Kelowna, Trail or Prince George.

Those that had the resources and interest to go further in teaching their students coding went to people like Rita Agarwal.

In 2013, after four years working in business intelligence, Agarwal launched TechUpKids, a coding camp that runs in summers, on the weekends and after school hours.

Agarwal once worked for a company based in India, which made for complicated working hours. With two children, the lifestyle wasn’t working for her any more. She started teaching her daughters some programming, and, when a friend suggested that she start teaching her children as well, an idea was born.

“I did two weeks and had no idea what I was going to do, and I tried to start a curriculum,” she says at a coffee shop on Vancouver’s west side, where many of the schools she teaches at are located. “At the time, there was not so much in the media about programming, so I would go around, and I used to go offer the flyers to people. People didn’t seem too interested, but they’d take it and then mostly through friends and friends of friends, they’d talk to each other on social media and on my social media about it.”

Once the provincial curriculum was introduced, Agarwal became highly sought after by schools — mostly but not exclusively of the private variety — who wanted their students to have more exposure to coding. By December of 2016, a “variety of schools” had contacted her. (She declined to say which ones.)

“Some schools have a problem with funds, so I don’t know how coding plays a role there. But there are schools, which are willing to offer programs but they don’t have teachers who are trained for it. So they are looking for people to go into the schools in school hours.”

Agarwal has found that coding isn’t necessarily prevalent, even in the more privileged schools. “Even though there is curriculum in place, I don’t think much has happened so far; they’re trying to figure it out.”

Still, she agrees with the methodology of bringing in teachers for lessons instead of hiring new teachers that know coding: “Let’s say I teach a six-hour workshop once. They (the teachers) can start understanding the program in their school and then I can go in again for five or six hours to go over stuff that they could have found difficult. In the long run, it’s more sustainable for groups to have their own teachers year after year.”

Paul Doig is one of those teachers. Ten years ago, Doig left his job as an electrical engineer and got a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia. Since 2014 he’s been teaching at Shawnigan Lake School, a co-ed private boarding school for secondary students (Grades 8 to 12) on Vancouver Island just north of Victoria.

“When I came to Shawnigan, they didn’t have a computer science teacher and they saw that I worked as a computer programmer in the tech sector,” says Doig over the phone from the school, where he lives among the students and serves as a ‘house master.’

In addition to computer science, Doig teaches physics while also offering robotics electives to senior students and coaching rugby. And while Shawnigan’s status as a private school allows for some freedoms in what he thinks the students should be learning, it still must follow ministry guidelines for its courses.

But according to Doig, those ministry rules for coding might not be very strict.

“There’s programs like ‘Hour of Code’ that some schools would be able to hang their hat on and say ‘Well we did some coding,’ and it allows for kids to get online and do some canned programming that’s provided by a third party. How deep that goes, well it’s going to be just as deep as a physicist teaching biology some days,” says Doig, who speaks from experience, as he’s also in that particular boat as a physicist who teaches his Grade 8 class about biology.

“But I know I can go deep if I need to, because I have colleagues that can help with that. But they don’t always have the resources to bank on a computer science colleague in an elementary school, or even some high schools.”

Doig teaches his younger students in Scratch, and notes that students also get some experience in HTML. He’s most comfortable imparting his wisdom in the more complex language of Java.

“We use Java, because I find that at this point, I can teach it pretty simply. I can scale it up or down and I just find that it’s a platform that’s easily done and I can create some quick programs for them to play around with.”

Doig calls the government’s current approach to coding “almost like a novelty unit,” and compares it to physical education classes that are taught by rugby or basketball coaches, where they bring in a dance teacher for two weeks to do a unit.

In its current form in B.C., no subject is fully ‘pushed out’ of the curriculum in order to make room for coding. Rather, it is bunched in with science and math and teachers are left largely on their own to fit it into those larger subjects.

But Doig suggests giving coding its own unit among the big four sciences. Traditionally, science is taught in the junior years (Grades 8 to 10) under the four main categories of chemistry, physics, biology and earth sciences.

“Really, [coding] could be a fully validated fifth wing. [But] it hasn’t been written into my Grade 8 curriculum that way.”

According to the government-mandated curriculum, Grade 8 students are expected to know how software programs work; binary number systems and how they represent data programming languages; and how to debug algorithms.

Text-based coding and mobile app development come into play at the Grade 9 level, while the curriculum for Grades 10 through 12 is still being developed by the government.

But Doig also insists that there have to be teachers hired who know the subject, and he sees the problem in advocating for that: “The problem is that a lot of computer science guys are never going to go into teaching. Those guys are in it not to teach; they’re in it to do software development. So that may be one hindrance to the whole plan as well.”

In its current form, even at Shawnigan, where the teachers aren’t beholden to ministry rules and there are an abundance of computers, Doig speculates that a standard student wouldn’t receive much exposure to coding, “unless they are seeking out electives that would actually facilitate that,” he says.

“For example, we have 130 kids in Grade 12. I have six Grade 12s in AP (advanced placement) Computer Science. It’s pretty minimal.”