Hands-on tech
IT’S AN irony of technology that the deeper it sinks into everyday life, the more remote it seems. When cars were still a rarity, drivers had to crank up their engines, but today we can cruise without the faintest idea of what’s happening under the bonnet – until something goes wrong.
A generation ago, computer users had to type commands in technical syntax to achieve the simplest things. Now a single application can do just about anything.
Easier computing makes for an easier life, but it could leave the next generation both more dependent on and more clueless about the microchip. The Raspberry Pi – the low-cost computer that went on sale in Britain on Wednesday and could soon break into schools – responds to this prospect. It’s sold as a few uncased components bolted on to a credit-cardsized board – so we really are talking back to basics – though not quite back to Basic: the clock speed alone would put any 1980s machine to shame.
But the cohort who learned the programming craft back then are the project’s greatest enthusiasts. They’re only human and so it is partly nostalgia – having copied out code from magazines and wired technical Lego engines up to their Spectrums –that makes them go gooey at the thought of their children getting similar hands-on experience.
The obvious point is – to go back to the car analogy – that the next generation of mechanics will have to come from somewhere, and they will require a degree of exposure to the nuts and bolts of computing.
Where new engine components embody new principles in sealed units, every computable language must – as Turing proved – embody the same essential logic. With a little sense of how to manipulate it, perfectly ordinary brains could dispatch everyday tasks better, by, for example, aligning diaries, reordering information, or recrunching bank statements from a format that makes sense for banks to serve up to a format that is easy to read.
The aim must be for the next generation to learn to control computers, rather than be controlled by them. – The Guardian