Commentary

BBC's 'Make It Digital' Impact Will Last A Generation

What a fabulous piece of news to end the week on --and what a way for the BBC to turn around a pretty awful bunch of headlines. Jeremy Clarkson will still dominate the running orders this weekend and next until the beeb decides what to do with the presenter who's on his final, final, final -- we really mean it -- final warning already. However, for the British digital scene the announcement of "Make It Digital" will be the longer-lasting legacy of the week's announcements.

It reminds me of the BBC Micro that got so many of my pals into computers when I was more interested in football and buying Depeche Mode singles. In fact, talk to anyone of a certain age and the Micro will go down as a major stepping stone into their lifelong love of computers and coding. So it's great to see that as part of the scheme, the BBC is working with partners -- including Google, Microsoft and Samsung -- to get a small computer device to one million eleven-year-olds. You can imagine there will also be an offer to get children of other ages involved.

The truly interesting part, which we didn't have in the '80s, will be a series of backup programmes. There is one called "Girls Can Code," and apparently the project is going to make it on to the sets of "Doctor Who" and "EastEnders." There will also be 5,000 digital trainers coached up and ready to go out and spread the word.

In a week that started so badly for the BBC, I have to take my hat off to it and I think the entire nation will be wishing it well. Against a backdrop of endless "real life" pointless shows in which Z list celebrities live out their lives followed by cameras in semi-scripted "chance" encounters with one another in a programming schedule that only seems to permit a show to be made if it has a "celeb" fronting it, this coding venture is such a welcome departure.

The BBC has always had education as one of its three founding pillars to entertain, inform and educate remit -- and so it's wonderful to see it going out of its way to concentrate on the pillar you could be forgiven for thinking it had forgotten about. 

The timing has yet to be announced, but make no mistake -- for an entire generation of children this will be huge, and will do more to get kids involved in digital than any single other initiative I can think of. And I don't mean playing endless hours of Minecraft -- has any adult got a clue what that thing is about? -- or trying to get Talking Tom the cat or Siri to say a rude word. This is going to get kids coding and creating their own entertainment. It's the loo roll and chopped-up milk carton; it's the arts-and-crafts part of computing, not the pointless hours collecting coal and diamonds and avoiding some bad guys I can't remember right now.

The news is massive, the project is ambitious, and its impact will last a generation. Forget Clarkson -- this is the really big BBC news of the week.

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