Geoff Mulgan: New generation of pioneers waiting to be switched on

YOU might have thought that learning about information technology in schools would be exciting and infinitely motivating. After all, teenagers find it hard to tear themselves away from games and social media. Left to their own devices, they have no difficulty creating new characters, stories and home movies.

Instead, what teenagers experience is often deadly dull, more about mastering the finer points of PowerPoint and Excel than learning how to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. The reason is that our children are being taught how to use digital things – but not how to make them.

That’s clearly a problem for them. But it’s also a problem for the Scottish economy and its ability to create jobs and wealth. Last year Nesta started working with Ian Livingstone – perhaps the country’s most celebrated games creator – and Alex Hope, who runs Double Negative, the UK’s largest visual-effects firm. We wanted to look at the skill needs of these industries, which are not small. The UK’s video games sector, with more than £2 billion in global sales, is bigger than either the film or music industries.

It quickly became clear through our work that these industries cannot afford to be complacent. Other parts of the world are catching up fast, with many UK companies complaining that they are struggling to recruit home-grown talent. We found that schools were part of the problem. In a nutshell they were preparing people to be consumers not makers, drivers of the new digital vehicles, not engineers and mechanics.

The report we published, Next Gen, found that digital businesses like Scotland’s Rockstar North need to be able to recruit from a pool of talent confidently able to use technologies to solve knotty problems. A good example is the challenge of convincingly showing how a computerised river flows, something Alex Hope’s company had to do for the opening sequence of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince, where the Death Eaters are flying across the Thames. This takes a lot of creative flair, but also a strong grounding in technical skill.

That’s why we recommended that computing should be taught as a rigorous discipline covering topics like programming, database structures and algorithms. That doesn’t have to be dull. Courses can, and should, incorporate the excitement and fun of programming games, apps or even real digital devices.

It is also important that our schools give students opportunities to see first-hand how digital products are made. Sometimes that may mean a lone genius working on their own, but much more often the successful products come from effective team work. Dave Jones’ original and highly acclaimed Lemmings game in 1991 was produced with a small team of around five staff in Dundee. Rockstar North now produce the Grand Theft Auto series from Edinburgh, with a team of up to 150.

This points us to the other change that’s long overdue in education. Learning isn’t something you should only do solo. It’s often best done with others, just as it is in the highest value parts of the economy.

A fascinating study recently showed that this was true even in Wall Street. The researcher looked at the top performing traders and asked what happened when they moved from one firm to another. The answer was that their brilliance disappeared, and they quickly slipped back to being average performers. What appeared to be individual talent was really about the chemistry of a team.

The implication is that to ensure prosperity in the future we need to get quite a few things right in tandem: a foundation of deep understanding of computing; the practical experience of making things; and a feel for how you work with others. None of these are impossible.

But the challenge is to make these types of opportunities available to every Scottish student. At Nesta we’re working on how to translate enthusiasm on the ground into real changes in the classroom. But to do this we need the support not just of teachers and heads. We also need the engagement of politicians and leaders of all kinds, who are often a bit scared of IT. They don’t really understand it, and they fear looking either like geeks and nerds, or just putting their foot in it. But for a nation that already has a leading position in one of the world’s great computer-based industries it should be an easy choice to build a new level of ambition into our schools. «

» Geoff Mulgan is chief executive of Nesta, an independent charity that develops ideas and skills