Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes on why coding is critical for Aussie kids
ATLASSIAN co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes took time out of his day yesterday to teach a group of delegates at a tech conference in Sydney the fundamentals of computer coding.
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ATLASSIAN co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes took time out of his day yesterday to teach a group of delegates at a tech conference in Sydney the fundamentals of computer coding.
He used the opportunity while hosting the one-hour long tutorial into “computational thinking” to highlight the importance of teaching coding skills to schoolchildren as young as seven years old.
“We need to get four million Aussie kids understanding and excited about computational thinking and learning to code at some level,” he said at the Atlassian Code Lab at CeBIT Australia.
“We don’t need to make them all computer scientists but we need to have them understand the technology so they can leverage it with any job they are going into.”
Mr Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002 and it has since grown into a tech titan, making them both billionaires along the way.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said yesterday that the Australian primary school curriculum was lagging behind other countries like the UK and Estonia who are already teaching young children computer coding.
“We are well behind in Australia … We need to shift the views on education to make it a lifelong thing, whatever stats you look at, kids graduating today will have five different careers spanning 17 different jobs,” he said.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said while there is a general acceptance from politicians that teaching children coding is important, it is also necessary to continue their tech education through adult life.
At the event Mr Cannon-Brookes taught members of the NSW government, the media and technology influencers the basics of coding on a program called Scratch, which allows users to tell the computer what to do through conditional statements, loops and events.
“This is exactly the same content we teach to seven-year- olds,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said.
He said Atlassian have taught coding in 65 schools across Australia, reached 3700 kids and trained 270 teachers in the basics of coding.
He said there was a “huge appetite” from schools for the classes, but stressed they should be government driven.
After the event yesterday Mr Cannon-Brookes told The Daily Telegraph last week’s federal budget was good for the technology sector, but said more funding should be provided for tech education.
“Generally I think the budget is pretty good, they are trying to do all the right things, but I was probably a little bit disappointed by how much money there is for areas like this sort of thing (coding and STEM skills),” he said.
“On the scale of things I don’t think its high enough up the priority list or high enough up the drive list.”