Digital skills and the teaching of informatics: confusion reigns under heaven

by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

For many years now, Europe has been hearing about the importance of developing digital skills in the workforce, so that the various productive and service sectors can become more effective and efficient. Digital technologies are indeed one of the factors that has contributed most to productivity growth over recent decades.

Yet they are also the factor whose role in production and services is most frequently and widely misunderstood. The automation brought about by information technologies entails a cultural and conceptual leap that requires appropriate support and adequate preparation on the part of the people involved.

In this article I will therefore develop two reflections connected to the role of informatics both in productive processes and in the education sector.

The automation made possible by informatics is something very different from traditional industrial automation. The latter first replaced the physical actions of people with the power of machines, under the guidance of human cognitive faculties. It then successfully mechanised bureaucratic tasks of low cognitive complexity: transferring money from one account to another, purchasing a good and processing its payment, checking stock levels and ordering replenishment.

When more complex cognitive tasks are at stake, however, the automation driven by informatics is attempting to replace human intelligence with a machine: this is a radical paradigm shift that contemporary society has not yet fully absorbed or understood.

One of the essential capacities of human intelligence is adaptability to changes in the environment — the flexibility to handle new or modified requirements. People have an innate ability to evolve in response to change and to learn from mistakes. Computer systems do not, and nor are the recent advances in machine learning able to provide this capacity, or likely to do so in the near future.

It is therefore not enough simply to computerise business processes. It is not sufficient, because the month after computer systems are installed they will need to be modified to adapt to changed conditions. And this maintenance process goes on without end, because a computer system is not a human being who adapts to new developments and learns from its mistakes. The automation of informatics therefore requires human supervision, in order to achieve the flexibility it does not innately possess.

I discussed the challenges posed by this mechanisation of cognitive aspects in greater depth almost ten years ago at the 2010 annual conference of the European informatics association Informatics Europe.

Precisely because of its profound conceptual implications, this subject cannot be fully grasped through a handful of digital skills training courses. This is also one of the reasons why the transition to Industry 4.0 will be long and difficult: what is needed is the absorption of ideas and concepts, rather than simply knowing tools and being proficient in their use.

It is necessary to start early and to begin in schools, and it is essential to do so with serious, well-designed education. Try to imagine — by way of comparison — a situation in which mathematics were taught only at university, and, having recognised the fundamental role that the ability to define quantities precisely and rigorously manipulate their relationships plays in an advanced society, we had to introduce the teaching of "mathematical thinking" into schools. I do not think that leaving it to the free initiative of individual teachers to decide what to teach, when, and how, would serve the country well in the long run.

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 (to say nothing of Japan and South Korea). To give just one detail: in the USA, informatics (and not coding!) has been placed, on an equal footing with other scientific and technological disciplines, among the subjects that must form part of a modern well-rounded education. An important role in this educational effort is played, in our country, by the Programma il Futuro project, of which I am the coordinator. To date — now in its fourth year — it has altogether introduced almost 3 million students to a "serious" informatics education (which we call computational thinking, to avoid the misunderstanding, extremely common, that teaching informatics means teaching how to use digital tools).

At the recent conference "Informatics culture as a driver of development," organised at the Chamber of Deputies together with the Innovation Inter-group, we made public our community's proposal — representing more than 1,500 professors and researchers in informatics and computer engineering — in the presence of MIUR. It is an articulated document, the fruit of a lengthy consultation process that involved not only our community, but also educationalists and teachers who have long been engaged in teaching informatics in schools.

Why does teaching informatics in schools matter? First of all, let us be clear that it does not mean teaching programming (i.e. coding, as it is now fashionably called). 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."

The same applies to informatics, 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 "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, how to use a language to give instructions to a computer. It means knowing how the machine (the automaton) that must understand our instructions is built. It means understanding how to express those instructions (the programming language). It means knowing how to develop algorithms capable of expressing instructions effectively. Our proposal sets out a comprehensive framework for introducing the teaching of informatics into schools.

The importance of this issue is also being discussed in Europe. One need only read the recent report on the state of informatics teaching in European schools, prepared by the two principal associations of European computer scientists: Informatics Europe (of which I am President, bringing 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, tailored to the different levels of schooling.

The matter will be discussed again on 15 March 2018 in Brussels with the European Commission.

FURTHER READING

CINI proposal on the teaching of informatics in schools: https://www.consorzio-cini.it/gdl-informatica-scuola

Results of the Programma il Futuro project (in italian): https://programmailfuturo.it/progetto/monitoraggio-del-progetto

Conference "Informatics culture as a driver of development" (in italian): https://programmailfuturo.it/notizie/cultura-informatica-fattore-di-sviluppo

The state of informatics teaching in European schools: http://www.informatics-europe.org/news/382-informatics-education-in-europe-are-we-on-the-same-boat.html

Why teach informatics in schools: Do we really need computational thinking? Communication of the ACM, 62(2), February 2019

Informatics: the fourth great domain of science: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computing-0

"RAI Scuola" lecture "Discovering informatics" (in italian): https://www.programmailfuturo.it/come/alla-scoperta-dell-informatica

Informatics Europe: https://www.informatics-europe.org

ACM Europe Council: https://europe.acm.org

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The original version (in italian) has been published by "Agenda Digitale" on 24 January 2028.