Digital Illiteracy (Or: how playing obsessive amounts of Rogue led to a skillset I still use)

I was in the middle of linking an article on my tumblr powered linklog when I realised that I had quite a bit to say about it. Now, my linklog is a linklog for a reason, so I try not to have more than a paragraph over there and hey, I’ve only gone and dusted off this here blog so that I could start posting to it!

The article was this one, from the BBC: Are children becoming ‘digitally illiterate’?, which deals with the lack of programming courses being offered to children and how the lack of those skills is impacting various fast growing industries in the UK.

And I thought, well, huh. I don’t know about you but my first experience with computers came through the weekly slot at school and the main thing I remember about that was using Logo, the programming language. Now, it wasn’t taught to us as programming language, it was a fun game to play – moving the turtle around until it created the shape you set out to create. But, it did it by slowly introducing the concepts of loops and commands.

Now, I was lucky because my dad has always had an interest in technology and so I had access to a series of early computers at home and with that, the ability to mess around outside of school based lessons. I played a lot of text based adventure games like Rogue (worryingly for my productivity and my spacebar, you can play Rogue online now) and eventually, I learnt BASIC and wrote my own very simple adventure games. One thing lead to another and I added several more languages to my repertory, had a brief stint in the dotcom boom (never made much any money, alas!) and now I’m a librarian who writes the odd bit of code, wrangles websites/LMS/databases and generally regards the systems side of libraries as her particular domain.

But, I probably wouldn’t have got that far if I hadn’t been introduced to the concept of programming at school by the Logo turtle. Without that, I am not sure how much thought I would have put into the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the games I played or taken that step into learning to write my own.

Now, what does this have to do with libraries? Well, some schools are working on bringing programming back to their classes but so could libraries. I’d love to see a couple basic, easy to take apart computers (that’s another rant-post!) in libraries that could be used to encourage kids to think about what’s under the hood of the things they’re so used to using. And then they could borrow books on code or access resources. I’d love to see a group of librarians get together and help kids learn more about code and hopefully, at the very least gain an understanding of what they could do with it.

Of course, I realise that when the public facing part of our sector is being squashed underfoot, that might be a bit of a long shot but I’m just throwing it out there because hey, it’s the kind of thing we could/should do and I’d love to see it.

Advertisement