The Royal Society’s Science Education Tracker suggests a decline in pupils’ interest in computing over secondary school, with 68% finding it interesting in Year 7, down to 35% by Year 11. Primary school is likely to be more positive, but it’s harder to get data. This comes down to both curriculum and pedagogy: what we teach and how we teach it.

The current national curriculum starts with the ambition that a high quality computing education equips pupils with computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world. There’s been plenty of focus on teaching the concepts of computational thinking, but not nearly enough practical programming in secondary schools for most pupils to start thinking computationally, in the sense of looking for automatable solutions to interesting problems. I’m concerned by how little creativity there seems to be in most computing lessons, and the negative impact that’s had on pupils’ engagement with the subject and their learning. In part, this is because of how dull GCSE computer science specifications are, and the knock-on effect that this has on the content and approach for Key Stage 3. I’m lobbying that we replace GCSE computer science with a new GCSE, covering the whole breadth of computing, including creative work in digital media, and add in robust, practical assessment as happens in other creative subjects.

Given how good generative AI is at writing code and producing digital media, it’s worth pausing to think about what computing education should be for. The way we use digital technologies has already changed, with many of us finding that these tools have become more useful, and that our use of them is now focussed on ideas, design, feedback and iteration. Our ability to make code and media is now about inspiration, ideas and creativity rather than our mastery of technical skills. Mastery of technical skills was never a sufficient condition for creative work, but until quite recently it’s been a necessary one. Many of us will continue to find enjoyment, and even employment, in creative digital work, using our own inspiration and experience to make better use of emerging technologies. Take chess as an example: computers are better than humans at chess, but humans still play chess, and humans get better at chess through using computers.

Much of the pioneering work of teaching pupils computing was done by Seymour Papert and his colleagues. Papert took Piaget’s idea of constructivism, that pupils learn through play, experiment and experience, and developed the theory of constructionism, recognising that learning happened especially felicitously when pupils were consciously engaged in making something to show to others. Learners didn’t just show their learning through making, it was through making that learning happened. Mitch Resnick, the creator of Scratch, puts it well: ‘make something in the world to make something in your head’. We know this for ourselves as educators: it’s through writing lesson plans and creating resources that we come to understand our subject, and how our pupils learn. The work young people do in Resnick’s Scratch is such a great example of Papert’s constructionism, where young people discover the big ideas of computing for themselves, through looking at others’ projects, adapting these, and then making their own animations, puzzles or games.

There are, I think, a number of aspects to creativity, with and beyond the computing classroom.

First, there has to be some creation: pupils should actually make something. Whilst there are good arguments for PRIMM (predict, run, investigate, modify, make) as an approach to teaching programming, I’m concerned that the last M, make, is silent and often invisible: resources and lesson time focus too much on the first four stages, at the expense of the last.

Creativity should also be about quality. It’s fine that the first attempt isn’t great, but the creative process typically requires that the artist or engineer not be satisfied with that, but rather they debug, they learn from mistakes, they iterate. There should be a striving for excellence, or at least for the best that’s possible with the time and resources available.

Originality is fundamental. The work really does have to be the pupil’s own, although it can take inspiration from and pay homage to the work of other creators - again look at the Scratch community for examples. It’s harder to see what originality means in the context of generative AI, but originality doesn’t have to mean doing all the work yourself. We demand that our students’ essays be their own work, but we also allow them to use generative AI as long as that’s acknowledged.

Creativity demands fluency with the tools used: it starts with craftsmanship, but it doesn’t end there. Bill Liao, founder of Coder Dojo, talked about ‘coder poets’, that young people become so fluent in the language of programming that they can use this as a medium for personal, creative expression. For this to happen, I think the focus should be on becoming fluent in one or two languages, rather than having experience of many: it’s very hard to do better than Scratch in primary and Python in secondary; creative projects in turtle graphics, games and music making can make the transition from one to the other smooth, and retain motivation in ways in which text based programs might not. Beyond coding, digital media work demands enough familiarity with the digital tools, and I’d now include generative AI here, that they are no longer the focus, that they cease to get in the way. Again, it’s better to master a few tools than to have experience of many.

My final aspect of creativity is about community - little creative work takes place in isolation, but rather through joining in with a creative community. Scratch, once again, offers a great example of this, as does Github for older programmers, but so too do many classrooms, at least potentially. Compare your way of working to that of your colleagues teaching other creative subjects: do you see more collaboration and communication in their classes than in your own? You can, if you wish, change this: I think your pupils might thank you for it, and perhaps love computing just a little bit more?

Originally published in Sapientia, the newsletter of ICT for Education.