For a growing IT company education is so much more than a sound bite or a political manifesto; for us it really is about our own future. In the early 1980s the BBC revolutionised the role of computing in the UK with the BBC Computer Literacy Project. In 1981 they released a TV series “The Computer Programme”, for which they wanted their own hardware to demonstrate. They put together what was (at the time) a cutting edge specification and approached numerous UK computer builders, settling in the end on a bunch of students in Cambridge called Acorn Computers. Later that year the first BBC Micro was released onto an unsuspecting country.
I was still required to wear shorts and a ‘bumble bee’ cap for school when I received my BBC Micro Model B; and, like many of my generation, it defined my future almost instantly. It was the first time I subscribed to magazines like ‘Micro User’, ‘Acorn User’, ‘Your computer’ and ‘BeeBug’ which I lapped up and would wait for the postman to deliver. It was an age when programmes came as listings which would have to be painfully and carefully typed out, sometimes taking hours. I didn’t have a disk drive at the time, so I’d get to play the games until they crashed or I had to switch of the micro. I still remember the excitement on getting a tape drive and successfully saving my first carefully typed out listing; it was soon followed by original games I’d painstakingly developed myself.
I’m not one for nostalgia, but an entire generation of developers in the UK grew up typing in their own listings and debugging code by reading it off a page. That just doesn’t happen today, and though I’m all one for progress, what is there that gets young people excited about writing code? That’s why it’s as important today as ever, for IT companies to engage with the youth to get them to see computers as more than just games machines or productivity tools – but as a blank canvas on which to exercise their creativity.
It’s one area Microsoft are again leading the way in with their XNA Creators Club. XNA allows amateurs to write games for their XBox 360, and it’s not particularly hard. But it’s an area that even relatively small companies can get involved in. Which is why we work so hard with the local schools, last Tuesday we went to North Chadderton High School to turn some of their students into ‘coders for day’, by showing them how easy it was to download and install Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and write their first ever programme – in this case a simple calculator in C#.
Today I got a lovely email from Carrie Marshall, the Enterprise Manager at the school, “First of all I want to say a massive thanks for the work you did with our Year 10 Diploma students the feedback was extremely positive from the students, one student went to the deputy head to express how much they had gained from the session. So thank you for doing it and at such short notice.”
On 20 July, Microsoft themselves will be attending the school to demonstrate XNA directly, and later in the year I will be presenting a guest lecture at Oldham College for the students on the IT Careers Academy. I also sit on the advisory board for the academy, allowing us to influence the future direction of the courses, and encourage students to participate.
We also provide mentors for the academy students, and are working with a number of other schools. Tomorrow, for instance, a team is at Bluecoats school providing mock interviews, giving the students experience of what it’s like to attend an interview for a job. Later in July I’ll be visiting Hulme Grammar to talk about opportunities to participate there as well.
Working with schools is not a publicity stunt for us. We’re not just passionate about young people and about IT, we’re committed to helping our local community, and we can’t encourage other businesses enough. There are plenty of opportunities, and if you’re finding it difficult to get involved with local education in the Oldham area, why not drop us a line, we’ll be happy to point you in the right direction!
In these difficult economic times, it’s easy for companies to become insular and self-focussed, but actually it’s really an ideal time to start reaching out and helping your neighbours, get involved in local programmes and initiatives that are making a genuine difference to the community in which you live and work.
You never know where you might end up. We’ve recently become lead sponsor on the Oldham Works campaign, promoting positive news about business in Oldham. Tomorrow the campaign is being presented to a certain Mr Brown in Downing Street, so it really does pay to get involved!