Apple, Microsoft and Google are muscling their way into British classrooms, but rather than alarm at industry interference, teachers are welcoming their support. Why? They're desperate for good computing course materials.
That's why, two years into the new computing curriculum, teachers are almost uniformly enthusiastic that Apple has extended its Everyone Can Code educational programme. Launched last year in the US, it's now at 70 schools and colleges across Europe, including 16 universities, colleges, and secondary schools in the UK. It’s a pretty simple scheme: Apple provides a free iBook textbook on app development with Swift, Apple's own coding language,, alongside guides for teachers. It's essentially a textbook on making iOS apps — but one that requires an iPad to read.
That said, it's a textbook gratefully received by British teachers desperate for better computing materials, according to Bill Mitchell, director of public affairs at the British Computer Society (BCS), the body that represents people working in IT. That's because the new computing curriculum remains "patchy" and "fragile," he says — meaning that help from any quarter is welcomed, even if it is limited by hardware.
"The new Apple one, it's a wonderful programme, but I'm somewhat questioning how many schools will find it particularly relevant for them," Mitchell says. "There's an awful lot of UK schools that don't actually have any Apple technology, so they'll find it challenging to adopt this." But that's one challenge of many faced by computing science teachers. The new curriculum pushes them to teach coding to even the youngest of students, but there's not enough teachers with a computing background.
Getting help isn't easy. Research last year from the National Education Union reveals that 94 per cent of teachers have had to pay for school supplies including books, while a report from the Royal Society called for a tenfold boost in cash for teacher training, with England recruiting only 68 per cent of the targeted number of computing teachers. No wonder then that a third of English GCSE pupils go to a school that doesn't offer the Computer Science GCSE – potentially exacerbating the already looming tech skills gap.
While the government has promised £100 million for training computing teachers, many are taking it upon themselves, sharing materials and tips via forums such as the BCS Computing at Schools, Twitter chats, and other support networks – as well as welcoming help from the tech industry.
Apple is by no means the first tech giant to dole out support to teachers. BT sponsors Barefoot Computing, which is used by half of primary schools in the UK, Mitchell said. Microsoft has multiple schools programmes to help boost teacher skills and "integrate technology into the classroom", and Google has awarded grants to Raspberry Pi and supports a wide variety of coding programmes. All offer free teacher training on their products. Facebook also recently unveiled plans to train a million Europeans in digital skills by 2020.
It's no wonder such companies are eager to help: the UK education tech market is reportedly worth £900 million. Google sells most of its Chromebooks to schools and universities, with reports suggesting Chromebooks nabbed 58 per cent of the US education market. Education may not have much money, but it's still a big market — and it's one where the leader can quickly change.
While helping students to learn offers a clear PR and marketing gloss — especially at a time when social networks and smartphones are coming under-fire as potentially damaging to children — Mitchell says some of the motivation behind such educational support is genuine. "A lot of these people honestly believe that computing science is going to help the human race, and solve a lot of the issues we have, from global warming to health care," he says.
That's the message Apple CEO Tim Cook is running with for the British launch of the App Development with Swift course, saying at the launch event: "I’ve believed this for a long time, and it is an intersection with Apple which has a deep belief in this as well, that education is a great equaliser of people." The Monday following the launch, Apple also announced a partnership with the Malala Foundation. Warm fuzzy feelings acknowledged, even Mitchell has some cynicism: "At the same time, there is also what I call enlightened self-interest at work," he says.
What could Apple get from this project, aside from positive coverage? It's unlikely to see a significant sales boost in iPads, despite the coursework locked down in iBooks. Of the 16 schools who have taken up the course so far in the UK, the majority were already using Apple products. In other words, it's a nice handout for existing Apple customers.
What about the rest? Most British schools aren't running iPads as their main hardware – some primary schools do – but a fair few have a set of iPads and Macs kicking around "as part of the mix", says Katy Potts, computing and e-safety lead for Children's Services at Islington Council in London. Plus, plenty of students have their own iPads, letting them access the materials at home even if they can't at school. "You can't ignore it's a really extremely popular device at home, across socio-economic groups it's the go-to device," Potts adds.
The other benefit to Apple is spreading the take-up of Swift, Apple's nascent development language. Cook told The Guardian that he saw coding as a smarter choice than mastering a second-language, but Apple's own Swift isn't widely spoken in British schools. In fact, according to a Royal Society report, It's taught in only one per cent of them, with teachers instead favouring more open languages such as Python and Scratch, the latter created by MIT and the former supported by Raspberry Pi, among many other platforms.
"Swift is a great language, but I think teachers and students would need to think very carefully before committing to this rather than something with broader scope such as Python or Javascript," says Miles Berry, lecturer at the School of Education at the University of Roehampton. "The principles of computational thinking are central to the endeavour, no matter what language or platform is used to express them." Apple insists that Swift lessons do include computing core concepts and have been designed to help students get their GCSE or A level qualifications.
The choice of Swift to teach app-making naturally benefits Apple by producing developers for its ecosystem – an aim clearly stated in its press release. It's also handy for students, as iOS app developer is an actual job, and one that has the potential to make actual money. Apple's own figures suggest iOS apps have created two million jobs across the US, with developers earning $16 billion globally since 2008.
Whether it's Apple's iOS course or MIT's code-with-blocks Scratch game, do any of these coding games and tools actually help students with their coursework? We don't really know. And that's a problem."We've been teaching this really badly for years," says Kate Farrell, a computing science teacher at a trio of schools in Edinburgh and former head of Computing for Schools in Scotland. "Industry is falling into the same traps that schools and colleges have been."
Core to the problem, she adds, is that so many of the coding tools do little more than offer step-by-step tutorials. "That's not how people learn." Instead, students need to be able to explore, break code in order to fix it, read what code they're producing, and more – and many such programmes lack that flexibility. "Educators can work better with industry to make sure we get the research-based pedagogy of how do we teach this better rather than just jump straight to code," Farrell says.
For example, students have come into her classes after using Apple's coding-for-kids app Swift Playgrounds, excited to have learned about coding. But when she asks them for details about what they've apparently mastered, they can't answer. "It appears to all be surface level," Farrell says.
But again, Farrell enthusiastically welcomes the industry help, saying the new Apple tools will be useful for helping students jump from games such as Scratch to actually writing their own code. "The more environments we have to help us with those stepping stones, that's brilliant."
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And that's because teachers don't necessarily use these tools as expected by the companies that create them. "An educator won't take just take a learning-to-code resource from industry, they'll adapt it so it fits their circumstances," Farrell explains. "I would be very unlikely to do a step-by-step tutorial in a classroom environment such as the resource [Apple] has produced, but for an educator that doesn't have a computing background, who has only been teaching computing for a year, that might be ideal."
In the end, programmes such as Apple's iOS making course aren't perfect, but they're better than nothing. "Right now, we're still in a situation where computing in schools is fragile, it's patchy, its future is uncertain," Mitchell says. "All the help we can get is just phenomenal. The fact that these companies are going into schools and helping is something we should be grateful for."
But beggars can be choosier than that may suggest, notes Alan O'Donohoe, a former teacher who now works for a small ed-tech company. If you're not able to afford Apple products to access its learning materials, there are alternatives – and they're not all industry-led, from the Cambridge-created Raspberry Pi to MIT's Scratch.
"Even though Google and Microsoft, for example, sell hardware, they offer learning programmes that are much more platform agnostic," O'Donohoe says. "Three of the best tools available for teaching Computing are the Raspberry Pi computer, Scratch and Python – these are wonderful resources that run on Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi."
Apple is belatedly adding one small tool to that pile, offering teachers one more tool to weave into their curriculum – or ignore, if they haven't any iPads. And with only 16 schools signed up, it may well be the latter, so don't expect colleges to turn into iOS app factories just yet.
Updated 24.01.18, 15:15: A point incorrectly attributed to an Apple spokesperson has been removed.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
