One of my biggest work related interests is getting young people interested in IT. It’s a bandwagon that’s gaining a good bit of support, and I’m definitely on it.  There are more and more ways of how to do this, and I’ll get to those in other posts, but for now I’m going to stick on the why. 

Dependence

We’re raising a generation of users. Millions of people are addicted to their laptops, smart phones and tablets without any clue as to how they work. “So what?” I hear you say, well, you’re a more savvy user if you’ve an idea of what’s going on behind the scenes. You might think twice about what information you share, and where you share it if you know how it’s being moved about, who can see it, and just how long it’s going to be around for. The earlier we can teach these lessons the better.

Problem Solving

At heart this is all programming is; breaking down a big problem in to smaller ones and then creating a series of instructions to solve them and that is just a good life skill. Yes you can argue kids already get problem solving through Maths, but in my opinion doing it through making a computer game is much more fun, and I know I remember the fun things better than the Maths… I mean boring things.

It’s The Future!

IT has infiltrated most industries and it’s moving in to those it hasn’t yet; this means the skills are in ever increasing demand. It also means an increase in the number of available career paths. IT is used to create animated movies, to send robots to Mars, to drive your car home without you in it, to win a Grand Prix, to create the latest app to make lives easier, and yeah, OK, to give people car insurance quotes. IT isn’t one job, it provides an endless list of options.

Get ‘Em While They’re Young

There’s probably a better heading I could have used here. What I mean is that there are real benefits to introducing these ideas to kids while they’re still young. Partly because they’re sponges; they just absorb information as it’s thrown at them, and partly because they’re not at all daunted by technology. Anyone that’s handed a kid a tablet will know how quickly they take to it so why not take advantage and use it to teach them some life skills too?