(versione italiana qua)
Not long ago, the Minister of Education, Valeria Fedeli, announced that from 2018 coding (that is, computer programming) would be introduced into primary schools.
There is widespread attention in the media and public opinion to the importance of introducing children to the "digital" world from an early age, but also a great deal of confusion. On one hand, people are seduced by the English term (I wrote about this recently) as though it promised some kind of extraordinary competence for our children; on the other, no distinction is drawn between the scientific, lasting, and formative aspects, and the technological-instrumental ones, which are interesting but transient. I discussed this in the original version (in italian) of this post, whose title — chosen by the editorial team — probably misled readers. While the intention was to highlight the importance of teaching informatics (and not just computer programming), and of calling it by its proper name rather than a fashionable anglicism, the result was the opposite. Several readers objected to the idea of teaching children a skill they associated with the workplace. I return to this point below.
Precisely because of the rather widespread confusion surrounding the teaching of digital skills, we at CINI (the consortium of more than 40 universities engaged in informatics research and teaching) had already been working for some time on how to incorporate informatics education into Italian schools. This is an area in which some countries — the UK, USA, France, and Germany, for example — are already in the implementation phase. In our own country, CINI has been running (now in its fourth year) the Programma il Futuro project, which to date has altogether introduced almost 3 million students to a "serious" informatics education (which we call computational thinking, to avoid the extremely common misunderstanding that teaching informatics means teaching how to use digital tools).
At a recent conference held at the Chamber of Deputies, organised together with the Innovation Inter-group — a cross-party group of Italian MPs (both Deputies and Senators) committed to the country's development beyond ideological divides — we made public our community's proposal, representing more than 1,500 professors and researchers in informatics and informatics engineering, in the presence of MIUR representatives. It is an articulated document, the fruit of a lengthy consultation process that involved not only our own community, but also educationalists and teachers who have long been engaged in teaching informatics in schools.
The document was discussed at the conference alongside educationalists and philosophers, as well as representatives of the business world, given that informatics education has both a cultural and a professional impact. I invite readers to watch the video of the event (in italian) to appreciate the multidisciplinary nature of the contributions, all of an excellent standard.
Before the discussion of the proposal, I presented a recent report on the state of informatics teaching in European schools, prepared by the two principal associations of European informaticians: Informatics Europe (which brings together university departments and corporate research centres) and the ACM Europe Council (the governing body of the European chapter of ACM, the world's largest association of computing professionals and researchers).
Its first and most important recommendation is that all students must have curricular access in school to informatics education (preferably beginning at primary level), since this scientific discipline must form part of the cultural toolkit of every citizen in the digital society. The second is that, to this end, it is essential to provide adequate training for teachers, naturally in different ways depending on the level of schooling. The matter will be discussed again on 15 March 2018 in Brussels with the European Commission.
Let me now return briefly to what teaching informatics in schools actually means, and why it matters. A more detailed treatment can be found in this article published in the journal Communication of the ACM. First of all, let us be clear that it does NOT mean teaching programming. Any more than teaching mathematics means teaching arithmetic. Take primary schools, where the study of mathematics begins with learning the times tables: the aim is not so much to know by heart that 3×2=6 or 12÷4=3, but to understand that if 3 girls have 2 sweets each the total number of sweets is obtained by multiplication, while if 12 biscuits are to be shared among 4 girls the number of biscuits per girl is obtained by division. We are not, therefore, teaching an operational tool so much as a key to understanding reality — "mathematical thinking."
Informatics is a discipline that, like other sciences, has its own particular perspective on the world — its own "conceptual paradigm" through which it describes and explains phenomena. This particular "perspective" is that of "automatic processes of information manipulation." So, just to give a few examples: just as quantity and its relationships are essential concepts for a mathematician, or molecules and reactions for a chemist, so algorithm, language, and automaton are essential concepts for a computer scientist.
It is never superfluous to point out that each of the great scientific paradigms — the human and social sciences, the life sciences, the physical sciences — can be used to describe the same reality, and depending on the case and context, one of them may be the most useful for understanding and explanation, or it may be their combination. Informatics adds a fourth great paradigm, that of "automatic processes of information manipulation," which opens up new and useful ways of explaining what happens across many domains, from biology to economics, from social relations to medicine.
Informatics is therefore not just programming — that is, using a language to give instructions to a computer. It also means understanding how the machine is built — the automaton — that must comprehend our instructions. It means understanding how to express those instructions (the programming language). It means knowing how to develop algorithms capable of expressing those instructions effectively. Our proposal sets out a comprehensive framework for introducing the teaching of this discipline into Italian schools.
Let us now return to the event at the Chamber of Deputies, where the importance of informatics both in schools and in the world of work was discussed.
Some highlights from the first round table on the CINI proposal: it was shown how informatics leads to the creation of tools that change our perception of reality (Simone Martini); the importance of teaching informatics in a way that does not allow the use of tools to erode our sense of "community" and "reality" was stressed (Italo Fiorin); and it was noted that learning tools which make things easy, without understanding how and why they work, is nothing more than an illusion of education (Giovanni Salmeri).
In the second round table, the legislative action taken to support the digital development of Italian businesses was acknowledged and welcomed, while agreement was reached on establishing a forum for dialogue between universities and industry — so that, while respecting the different time horizons within which each operates, educational solutions can be defined that prepare people for an active professional life throughout their entire careers, while at the same time helping companies navigate this epochal social transformation without delay.
I always emphasise that the productive automation brought about by informatics (the so-called "digital enterprise") is radically different from traditional industrial automation. The latter was essentially the replacement of people's physical actions with the power of machines, under the guidance of human cognitive faculties. Digital automation, by contrast, is the replacement of human cognitive capacities with a machine — one that, however, will never be as intelligent as a human being, even if it processes data far more quickly.
This is a cultural problem: unless we truly grasp how deeply this is true, no digital innovation will ever produce the results we hope for.
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "Il Fatto Quotidiano" on 20 December 2017.