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What that looks like is still up for debate, with little to no indication from the government as to how the $50 million put aside for coding will be implemented.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a battle that\u2019s likely to continue to be waged on education boards and in provincial legislatures. No one wants to get left behind, and as the job market shifts rapidly and relies on new skills and technology, parents and teachers will be left fighting for their kids and their livelihoods, respectively.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Sarah Sumner fights for both.<\/p>\n
As the 11 students at Ottawa\u2019s Acad\u00e9mie\u00a0de la\u00a0Capitale run off to music class after a dizzying 45 minutes, Sumner packs away their computers. She is comfortable with the role she plays in computer coding education, both as a science, technology, engineering and mathematics teacher and as a parent. She has two young daughters who go to the school and she is meticulous in updating a blog that parents can access to see what their children learned each day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are some students the program is a great fit for and there are others that choose to move on at times in their school career. There\u2019s a lot of things the parents have to decide,\u201d Sumner says. \u201cMy daughters started (working with computers) in daycare and just continued on. It\u2019s a challenge but I think most of the time they like STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) too.\u201d<\/p>\n
For teachers like Sumner and Paul Doig, who teaches at B.C.\u2019s Shawnigan Lake School, private education seems to offer both the freedom and resources to teach coding.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s some necessarily back-end stuff that needs to be done to help a full-scale adoption of computer programming in schools,\u201d says Doig, referring to the lack of computer science experts in most schools across the country. Even at Shawnigan Lake, which boasts an abundance of computers and where almost every student has a laptop, Doig is one of only two teachers with an aptitude in computer programming.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust think if we never had a biologist in the school, how are you going to get biology into the school? It\u2019s a challenge that\u2019s going to happen but it\u2019ll happen and some of the faculty members that I know are keen to learn it, but they also have to be trained. Computer science is logical, but it\u2019s not always intuitive, if you know what I mean.\u201d<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen whether public schools will be able to catch up, even if provided the federal funding. It\u2019s also unknown if coding will ever become universal or prevalent. So far, it looks as if B.C. is falling far short of its goal to have, in the words of the premier, \u201cevery child speak code.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rita Agarwal, who, like Sumner, starts young students out with the MIT-developed program Scratch<\/a>, thinks that coding can be brought into schools in a cost-effective way.<\/p>\n