Why every child should learn to Code

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Next week my daughters turn five. They are growing up in a radically different world to the one I knew when I was a kid. I was one of the generation inspired by the first wave of home computers: I taught myself to program on a ZX81, then a BBC Micro. Those early computers were glacially slow, had almost no storage and you had to write code to get them to do even the simplest task.

Today, I have a computer in my pocket that is more than 100,000 times faster and has 10,000,000 times more memory than a ZX81. It is connected to every other computer on the planet and can access virtually every piece of human knowledge ever created, nearly instantaneously. The pace of change in computing is extraordinary.

Somewhere in the mid 1990s, we lost our way. The education system largely ignored the explosive growth of computing and the internet, instead focusing on teaching students how to write Word documents. Instead of a nation of builders and entrepreneurs, we were content for our children to become also-rans on the technology stage.

We at the Year of Code are going to help change that. The new computing curriculum starts this September, and it puts coding at the heart of IT education. Coding is the art of telling a computer how to perform complex tasks. Once you know how to code, you can create virtual worlds within the computer where the only limit on what is possible is your imagination. We want to put this power into the hands and hearts of every child in Britain.