Saturday 15 November 2014

Learning to play a song before learning the chords....

Recently, I volunteered at my first 'hackathon' for girls from schools around the region, learning to build their own mobile apps. Currently my research has not led me into mobile application development, so I thought it would be a good exercise to learn about these and also volunteer and encourage more young females to take up software engineering in the future.

The hackathon in actual went very well, very excited students, who very clearly extremely creative and willing to learn more about the new HTML tags while building their applications. They used tools such as X-ray goggles (web page analysis), Thimble (online compiling), Ratchet (for mobile app), codeacademy HTML and Byethost (hosting the apps). Cool tools and new innovative solutions were being developed.

I did a mini survey, on asking them what they want to do when they grew up? Surprisingly, none of them said they wanted to do computing. It was either History, Art or any other social sciences, but all wanted to learn how technology works. They did say these kind of events could raise their awareness and willingness to take on computing in the future. Fingers crossed.

However, from an engineering point of view, I found how hackathons run in general, could be damaging to computing in general in the future. The manner in which the students were taught how to code, was to first give them an example and show them how it works by compiling it. And then the students were told to go experiment and start updating the code for their own applications. There was no stage of requirements gathering, state machine explanations, algorithmic explanations or even a design phase!

"Here is an example, now change various lines of the code (by copying and pasting) and go create your own."

It reminded me of my days of learning to play the guitar where it was drilled into me that I needed to perfect the chords before going on to the songs. Now, although I do understand that you only have two days in a hackathon, to produce working apps. But wonder whether actually being part of a hackathon, has completely destroyed the basics of software development in these kids. All of them went away thinking, "O this is easy, its just copying and pasting."

Although I appreciate the efforts, STEM is trying to do to attract more females into computing. I fear whether this approach would be the correct one which (1) does not destroy their basics in software engineering (2) undermine the 4 years of studying of a software engineering degree in the future (3) has a reaction, on some student when they start thinking that they actually do not need a degree in software engineering or development.

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