One of the discussion points at the National ICT Skills Summit over the past two days was the fact that there are chronic pipeline issues when it comes to bright and talented people entering Information Technology (for the record, I think that Information Technology is a much better descriptor than ICT - Information Communications Technology... lay people understand that IT is, they have no idea what ICT stands for).
It was identified (well I actually raised the point on the discussion panel yesterday) that children are getting passionate about technology well before there is any formalised educational offering for them. Kids at age 10 are at home spending hours building both technical skills (and without even knowing it, building other soft skills like networking, strategy, collaboration etc. which come in very handy later in life). We all recognised that we need to capture and nurture their passion earlier in their school lives. When students are getting to grade 11 and encountering a 'part-time' IT teacher (ie the old Physics teacher, or even worse... the librarian!!) and realising they know 50x as much as the teacher... the flame dies very quickly, and students run for engineering, accounting, science and law.
A project to fix this (and one of the cooler projects I have worked on recently) was announced at the National ICT Skills Summit today. 'Take IT On' is a project where the AIIA, with lots of industry partners (like Microsoft) will engage with students in grades 8-10 and share their passion about our industry. Nice and relaxed environment... passionate role models... and to top it off some hands on Xbox!
What do I have to do with the program? I just developed it from a simple idea to a marketable offering. Yeah, you can blame me for the name too :) (honestly, you should have seen some of the earlier names that they came up with... they were utterly disgusting. At least this one is simple!)
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