“I can’t teach coding - the kids are better at it than I am.”
It’s a complaint that I hear a lot when I visit primary schools to talk about writing, coding and animation.
This look of horror crosses the faces of teachers, who feel that coding is right at the edge of their expertise.
They’re often only teaching it because they “get” the subject a little more than everyone else in the staffroom - and because, well, the curriculum says it’s got to be taught. But they don’t feel comfortable, and they rarely feel they’re completely on top of the subject.
At its heart, this is a problem not with coding but with our attitude - the way that we think about coding. Coding, we surmise, is about computers. It’s about numbers, and calculations, and thinking logically. Coding is a science, and it should be taught like a science.
But coding is not a science. It’s about logical procedures and the automation of linking one event to another, certainly.
But it’s all done in the pursuit of creative rather than technical aims.
Part of my work is as an animator. I make cartoons and movie special effects. To do that, I use all the tools of coding. But I don’t use them like a scientist. I use them like an artist.
Coding is just a different media in the arts. It’s the same as sketching or writing. It’s about building a story and communicating it through a medium. Just like learning to paint, or use grammar, it requires a few technical skills, but is it not really about those skills.
Pupils can express themselves
That’s certainly how the children are thinking about it. They don’t see designing a videogame as a technical job. They see it as a creative project. They’re excited by it because it allows them to express their individual ideas. They learn the maths of coordinates not because they’re interested in geometry, but because moving a Pac-Man around a maze requires that skill.
Why does this matter? It matters because teaching science is about knowing more than the pupils and helping them to discover what you already know. If you stand up in a science or a maths lesson and the kids know things you don’t, then that’s scary.
But in art, it’s different. If you’re an arts teacher, a music teacher, an English teacher, and your student produces an idea that you wouldn’t have thought of in a million years, you don’t feel intimidated.
You feel proud of them. You go to the staff room thinking you’ve done a good job because you’ve enabled someone to access their own genius.
An arts teacher doesn’t feel they have to be better than their students at every aspect of what they’re teaching. The creative teacher’s job is to recognise skill. It’s to know what’s easy and what’s challenging for their pupils, and ask them the questions that will enable them to stretch themselves.
Of course, you can’t teach the next Van Gogh without knowing a bit about painting, but you don’t have to be better than Van Gogh. You just have to recognise his genius, show him how the paints work and point him at the subjects that are going to inspire him and move his art forward.
Working this way does mean a bit more chaos in the computer room. Pupils will be working at different speeds, and some will end up producing work that is vastly different from others. Pupils will swap ideas and use each other’s techniques as much as yours, like a noisy art class - but that’s okay. As long as you know where each child is, and which questions will stretch their own projects.
Just as in an art class, some children will be better at different media. In coding, some will be interested in programming the mechanics of a game, while others may be more driven by developing a cartoon’s story or drawing the individual frames that make a movement. It’s all good, because it’s all creative, and it all makes children actively want to solve the technical stuff to make their ideas work.
Christian Darkin is a children’s author and animator, writing stories with scientific and technological themes. He’s the author of the Act Normal series for KS1-2 and The Skull, published by Bloomsbury for older children
