Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

This Thursday I attended a meeting set up by the Priority One Instep team.

Myself and Rory Birkbeck were there to represent the IdeaShed and we were meeting secondary school teachers from schools all-round the Tauranga region.

The meeting's main purpose was to introduce the IdeaShed to the teachers and to discuss ICT, the need of it, the teaching of it, and the way we think the IdeaShed can help to provide resources and skills to teachers and students.

The national curriculum has been changed to include better introduction to programming, but that is a paper exercise.

Few schools seem to have the resources to actually deliver on this and there seems to be some concern that the current structure for credits makes it difficult for teachers and students to rationalize the time required to gain a small number of credits.

The curriculum is pretty out of date in that programming is not taught much sooner via graphical programming tools.

Learning programming is a useful way to build logical, analytical thought patterns for problem solving.

It also builds an understanding of the mechanisms which run the manmade world of the information age, as physics did for the mechanical, industrial age.

It is a good opener to computer science, which is valuable to support all other sciences and industry.

But doing this means something else may have to be pushed off the curriculum and other industries could argue that they have needs and their needs should also be addressed.

We should start medical training earlier to ensure more doctors, or we should do more citizenship and law (do we need more lawyers?).

So I do understand the pressures on the curriculum writers and our school systems to provide a ‘rounded education'. Schools cannot do it all, which is one of the founding principles of the IdeaShed – one which seemed to hit a note with the teachers present.

The remedy is to engage industry and involve it directly in many ways to provide opportunities for real world training and assistance.

We are not talking about some new apprentice scheme here.

We are talking about having members of industry assist our local teachers in accessing good material to help them deliver the curriculum.

As one teacher said: 'Having a developer tell me a certain video is a great way to teach an aspect of coding would be a huge help as I would have no idea if the video maker was right or talking rubbish.”

Having mentors provide an hour a week to guide projects the students are doing or provide the teachers with training.

Right now the IdeaShed is working with IT professionals such as Tim Ucken, Rory Birkbeck and Justin Moore to help school groups learn new IT skills or improve.

As part of that, the groups also learn about product development and design, project management and planning.

They learn IT does not work in isolation. It is an enabler of industry and a value adding skill.

In time as the Ideashed grows we hope to have more mentors or people who can help with resources and more sectors of the local industry represented.

So that we can in industry can take an active part in developing our future work force and the future industry leaders for the region.

To paraphrase and old charity add, we can give people nets to catch the skills they need.

Many of the people involved in the IdeaShed will also be present at the Mashup competition at the end of March. www.mashup.co.nz

It is a wonderful event where you can see the enthusiasm of not just the children but also the teachers and local IT people who all give up their weekend to offer opportunities and experience to young people in the region.

It's a very Kiwi thing to do and in doing it we cannot fail to make better futures for all our kids.

One last note, I am off to Bangalore this Saturday, I have heard a figure that in this city of six million, one million are involved in the IT industry.

Most of that work is for US and European clients.