Technology is changing faster than schools can keep up - and trying to predict the precise technical skills children will need in ten years’ time may be the wrong way to prepare them for the future.
By Jude Ower
Technology is changing faster than schools can keep up - and trying to predict the precise technical skills children will need in ten years’ time may be the wrong way to prepare them for the future.
That is the argument made by Shahneila Saeed, Head of Education at Ukie, the UK’s interactive entertainment trade body, in our conversation for the latest episode of the Good Game Club podcast.
Shahneila is a former computing and IT teacher with more than 15 years’ classroom experience, who created Ukie’s Digital Schoolhouse, which provides free computing workshops and resources to schools and uses play to develop computing and creative digital skills.
As generative AI becomes more prevalent in the workplace, Shahneila believes schools need to put greater emphasis on the capabilities that remain distinctly human: creativity, innovation, resilience, collaboration and the confidence to adapt. “Creativity is not going away,” she says.
For Shahneila, games offer a particularly powerful environment in which to develop those skills. They can make abstract concepts tangible, expose young people to careers they may never have known existed and give children who struggle in conventional classroom environments new ways to participate and succeed.
Here, she explains why play and fun belong at the heart of learning, what AI means for the skills children need, and why the people the games industry hopes to employ tomorrow are already sitting in classrooms today.
This interview – hosted by Jude Ower - has been edited and condensed from the original Good Game Club podcast for length and clarity.
Can you tell us a little about your background and what led you to Digital Schoolhouse?
I’m currently Head of Education for Ukie, and prior to this I was a teacher. I trained as a computing and IT teacher. I taught in secondary schools for over 15 years, and then I left teaching to join Ukie to create the Digital Schoolhouse programme.
Can you tell us what the Digital Schoolhouse programme is?
Digital Schoolhouse is a programme that seeks to transform computing education through play. We deliver free workshops and free resources and make those available to schools across the country.
We work hand in hand with industry. Part of the practice of what we do is taking industry knowledge and expertise and transforming that into tangible activities that can be delivered to a ten-year-old in a way that they completely understand, and that inspires and engages them with computing and creative digital skills. It also brings relevance to what they do and gives them purpose behind why they’re studying computing.
We also deliver esports tournaments, we run I believe the country’s largest school-based esports tournament. For us, that’s a method of careers education. Rather than talk to the children about a career, we throw them into the middle of it. We let them experience it firsthand.
There are so many careers within video games that I think are invisible to the average consumer, especially if you’re a child. I think it’s really difficult to be inspired by something you don’t even know exists. You can’t put yourself into the position of a technical artist if you don’t even know that career is a thing.
So that’s what we seek to do. We try to make those invisible careers visible, and we recognise that the best way to get through to a child is to help them experience it for themselves.
Do you see an evolution over time of the skills that you need to keep teaching for future opportunities?
As you go through, you start to deepen the learning. With younger children, you will start off quite broadly and high-end conceptual, the mechanics of the game or the art of the game. And then with each educational phase, you’re diving deeper, you’re helping to embed more technical skills. You’re showing them how the different disciplines are interacting with each other and helping them understand that games are in the vast majority of cases developed by teams of people working together.
It’s as much about technical skills as it is about softer skills?
t’s about both, absolutely. If we look at where we are with children and education, we fundamentally need to develop both. The technical skills are really important. Children, on a technical level, need to be able to get up to a certain level of foundational expertise if we’re going to get them to specialise in the world of careers later on.
But absolutely, one of the things that is so fundamentally important are the soft skills. “Soft skills” doesn’t seem a nice way to describe them because I feel like it devalues what they are. Someone once described them to me as “smart skills”. I really like that term.
The resilience, the collaboration, the ability to be able to take on critical feedback - all of those aspects of working and those lifelong skills which we know industry is telling us the next generation, or the current new entry into the workforce, really needs.
Especially with AI?
Absolutely. Creativity is not going away. If we think about where we are with technology continuing to evolve, now you can get generative AI producing code. I met someone the other day that’s producing a platform predominantly programmed through AI, for example. But the bit that the AI can’t produce is the creativity. This individual is the driver that knows how and when to master the AI, what they’re going to do, what they’re producing. It’s that human creative vision and innovation. And that’s what we need to emphasise and nurture amongst our students.
That’s what I like about games, because it allows you to tap into so many of those skills.
If you’re looking at the recent curriculum and assessment review that the government produced, there’s this recognition now that oracy is a skill that also needs to be nurtured amongst our children. That’s been something we’ve been doing through Digital Schoolhouse for a while. The esports tournament’s been running since 2016. Alongside it, since 2016, we’ve also awarded a trophy not just to the national champions, but to the best shoutcaster of the tournament.
In some of our other events and activities, we have professional shoutcasters delivering commentary workshops to ten-year-olds. When you see how the students receive those and how the teachers receive those, they talk about increased confidence. They talk about students developing their oral skills and their public-speaking skills.
These are so valuable because it enables a student to be able to speak up and express themselves. Which is important, not just because it’s important to be able to express yourself; but as a teacher, I’m relying on the feedback you’re giving me as a student to help me understand what’s inside your brain.
Something you’ve spoken about before is about being frustrated by dry rote learning approaches. What have you seen in classrooms that really convinced you that play would work better?
This comes back to my days as a teacher. I loved teaching. I still love teaching. But I guess that’s one of the reasons I left teaching to join Ukie, because I got free rein to be creative.
When you are a computing teacher, you are taught to teach computing in a computer lab, basically. But when you’re teaching computing and digital skills, there are not just the technical skills; there is the theory as well.
When I got my job in my first school, they decided that the theoretical aspects would be taught in a non-computing suite. So, there were no computers. There were just tables and chairs and kids sitting in front of you. And I looked at that and thought: I don’t know where to begin. This is not what I’ve been trained to do.
I said, “How do I do this?” They said, “Well, you talk to the children, you write notes on the board, they copy your notes, and then you ask them some questions and they answer the questions.” And I’m like, “That’s it? There’s got to be more to it than that.”
It felt like there was a massive component to this teaching thing that was missing. So, I decided to observe other subjects and other teachers and other schools. And in a lot of the cases you were finding that same thing. There’s a teacher explaining, there’s children making notes. Whether a child was happy, excited and fully engaged depended on the charisma of the teacher. That was the problem: the engagement.
That’s what led me to thinking there’s got to be something else. I started researching, experimenting and exploring. It was one particular lesson which was the epiphany moment, this is the bit that I’m missing. I had to teach public and private key encryption to an A-level, Year 12 class. I came across the work of Dr Tim Bell, who’s based in New Zealand, and he used locked boxes, padlocks and a bar of chocolate to explain public and private key encryption. I watched it once and it was a jaw-dropping moment. It just blew my mind. I thought, “Yes, yes, I get it!” So, I thought, ‘Can I do this myself?’ And I did. And the children just got it.
What this style of constructive kinaesthetic learning does is it creates a middle step where you’re getting to grips with the topic with your hands. That helps you craft that mental model. It helps you put together the jigsaw puzzle of this concept so much easier. That’s the difference between why I think that sort of dry, rote learning really is a thing of the past, because this is how we learn as human beings. It’s more enjoyable as well.
Fun for me is a fundamental part of education. Having fun is fundamental because, as human beings, we are driven to experiences we find enjoyable, and there doesn’t need to be any more motivation than that. I enjoy doing this. I want to do it. And so, if we can make our education fun, you deepen and increase the chances of children sticking with it.
What has the reception been from schools, and from parents who might see games as a distraction or frivolous?
The traditionalist views on education and what education should be still prevail. In the beginning, I’m not going to lie, there was scepticism about these approaches.
When we were delivering our workshops, you would have visiting primary teachers expecting the children to go straight to sit in front of a computer. And when instead we were getting them into the middle of the room to do some dancing or to do some magic tricks, they thought I’d lost it a little bit.
But when you take people through that experience, that’s when the penny drops and the realisation hits. It’s like: you’re not mad. You know what you’re talking about. I get this now. And not only do I get it, but this was fun, and I think I could do it again, and I think I will do it again. It creates that perception shift and changes that mindset. The Digital Schoolhouse experience has become our USP and is quite experiential.
How do you convince the parents?
When we carried out our research and evaluation, children were going home, they’d had such an exciting day and it was such an unexpected experience, but in a pleasant way, that they were sharing their experiences in the playground and then sharing their experiences at home.
We’ve had feedback where children have gone home and replicated the learning with their younger siblings because they enjoyed that magic trick so much. They now understand data representation or they understand that bit of programming, and they want to go back and do some more.
When we look at our esports tournament, we often find parents engaging with that as well. They’re seeing the impact of the work at home. They’re seeing their child engage.
Quite often, the parents that have been the most vocal are the ones whose child maybe has an element of neurodiversity, or they may be the quieter child in school. They’ve really noticed a difference in their child’s behaviour and their confidence levels at home.
It does create an equal playing field, doesn’t it, no matter the ability of the child?
We speak to the teachers directly, and the impact is profound and transformative.
We’ve heard stories where you’ve had students whose stutter is so bad they can’t engage in class discussion, and then the teacher is observing them at one of our knockout events, observing this child taking part in the commentary, and they’re not stuttering once.
We’ve had children who have been victims of bullying, who have been on suicide watch, and the feeling of participating in our esports tournament has had such a profound effect on their self-esteem and confidence that they stood up to the bullies.
They’re finding their way back to the light, so to speak. They’re much happier in school, and then that has a marked improvement on their grades. We’ve had disengaged students who are now getting GCSE qualifications in English because they are attending school and taking part in their speaking assessments because they’re able to hook it into our esports tournament.
What myths do young people or parents or teachers have about working in the games industry, and around the skills that you can learn as you play that can help you into careers?
There are two that are quite common that you hear from parents and sometimes children. The first is about video games being a hobby. [According to Ukie] the UK games industry is worth about £8 billion to the economy. That’s not just a hobby. That’s a livelihood. That’s a profession. It’s a serious business and a career path.
The other one you often hear predominantly from students is: “I’d like to work in games, but I really don’t like programming, so I can’t.” They limit themselves and associate games with programming.
Yes, of course, programming is a huge discipline within the games sector. But there are so many other disciplines, whether it’s storytelling, art, whether it’s organising people or just speaking. Whatever your passion, there’s a place for you in the industry. There’s lots of different opportunities and routes.
What more could the industry be doing to play a bigger role in education?
I think there’s always space for industry to engage. It’s recognising that the people you want to employ tomorrow, those people are sitting in classrooms today. And so if you want to get the best out of your future workforce, today is the day we need to start planting those seeds and help nurture that growth.
If we’re going to make our industry better, we need a diverse representation of people making our games that reflect the consumer base. And so the best way to do that is to reach out to those people and find them where they are now. And that is schools.
Reach out to your local school. If you’re in industry and there’s a school down the road, contact them.
Quite often schools and educational institutions do want to engage with industry but don’t know how and don’t know if industry would be interested. If people are not sure about how they want to engage, you can reach out to us at Ukie. That’s what we’re here for. Digital Schoolhouse has always been described as a bridge between industry and the classroom.
Industry is innovating all the time. Something completely profound. That exciting thing that you are working on will turn the light bulb on for so many students, it will inspire so many of them.
Everybody’s got a story to share. If you’re working in industry, if you’re a narrative designer, tell me how you make stories. How did you craft the story behind your game? Where did you come up with that idea? How can somebody else do this? These are all things that are just everyday knowledge for the people in our industry, so much so that they don’t give it a second thought. But these are pivotal learning tools for children. And I want to get that knowledge into the hands of the children. So, help me do it.
It’s about helping the industry realise what they can share and what’s so special about what they do?
We run Festival of Play, which is a tech conference for 9-14-year-olds. Think of your standard conference. Now take away the coffee and put in lots of ice cream. You’ll have the keynote. You’ll have the workshop streams. You’ll have the exhibitor area. But the entire focus is targeted at 9-14-year-old children, and it helps them learn computing in a different way. It helps them see the relevance of what they’re learning in school with the world of work and the world of careers.
The exhibitor areas get them engaging one-on-one with the people behind the tech.
It’s allowing children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds who have less access to these resources, less access to the technical equipment and less access to the industry experts, to bridge that gap between disadvantaged students and the industry.
And for us, with any events that we do, yes, we’re supporting the children. But the thing is, if I have ten children in front of me, I’m helping ten children. But if I have ten teachers in front of me, I’m helping an exponential number of children. You’re giving the teachers the tools and the resources for them to take that knowledge and what they’ve learned, and they will use it not just for the children they’re teaching today, but for the children they’re teaching tomorrow and next week and in three years down the line.
If every school embraced one idea of a Digital Schoolhouse, what would you want it to be?
I think the devices and the technology we see in front of us, they are tools, and tools will be whatever you wield them to be. The magic comes from the creativity and the innovation from the human that is wielding that tool.
So, creativity and innovation are key pillars that must remain part of our education system, but not just the education system, but our home environments and how we’re nurturing our children.
Technology is growing so fast, faster than education systems can keep up. We can’t have an education system where we think that is a skill set this child needs in ten years, because we don’t know. And the fact that we don’t know is the only constant. The disruption is the only constant. We know it’s going to be a disrupted future.
What we must teach our children is the ability to be creative, be innovative, to embrace challenge, to be resilient and to be adaptable, to be able to adapt, to change, to be able to make sense of the world around them, the shifting landscape and to be able to see the opportunities and grasp them and to do so confidently. I think those are things that Digital Schoolhouse fundamentally, through our approach to education, aims to do.
What would it take to get Digital Schoolhouse into every school in the UK?
One of the things that makes Digital Schoolhouse so successful amongst schools is the fact that we don’t charge. Schools that apply to join the programme in order to deliver workshops don’t pay to join the programme. They don’t pay for the training. They receive a financial bursary to support their delivery costs.
We’ve got 70 schoolhouses across the country. They support somewhere in excess of 500 schools between them because it’s like a hub-and-spoke model. So, we’re supporting about 500 schools annually at least. None of those 500-plus schools that attend a physical, in-person workshop pay for that workshop or the resources or anything else that goes with it.
The reason we can apply that model is because we are funded by industry and government. So, what would help us get into 100% of schools across the country? To be completely frank and brutally honest. It’s the funding to be able to reach every school in the country. We currently have coverage for about 77% of the schools in the UK. Our goal is to try and get to 100% by 2030. We know there are gaps, and we would love to work with people, partners and organisations that can help us reach those gaps.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Shahneila Saeed – ‘Digital Schoolhouse: Teaching Smart Skills Through Games’ - on the Good Game Club podcast here Good Game Club Podcast - YouTube.
As generative AI becomes more prevalent in the workplace, Shahneila believes schools need to put greater emphasis on the capabilities that remain distinctly human: creativity, innovation, resilience, collaboration and the confidence to adapt. “Creativity is not going away,” she says.
For Shahneila, games offer a particularly powerful environment in which to develop those skills. They can make abstract concepts tangible, expose young people to careers they may never have known existed and give children who struggle in conventional classroom environments new ways to participate and succeed.
Here, she explains why play and fun belong at the heart of learning, what AI means for the skills children need, and why the people the games industry hopes to employ tomorrow are already sitting in classrooms today.
This interview – hosted by Jude Ower - has been edited and condensed from the original Good Game Club podcast for length and clarity.
Can you tell us a little about your background and what led you to Digital Schoolhouse?
I’m currently Head of Education for Ukie, and prior to this I was a teacher. I trained as a computing and IT teacher. I taught in secondary schools for over 15 years, and then I left teaching to join Ukie to create the Digital Schoolhouse programme.
Can you tell us what the Digital Schoolhouse programme is?
Digital Schoolhouse is a programme that seeks to transform computing education through play. We deliver free workshops and free resources and make those available to schools across the country.
We work hand in hand with industry. Part of the practice of what we do is taking industry knowledge and expertise and transforming that into tangible activities that can be delivered to a ten-year-old in a way that they completely understand, and that inspires and engages them with computing and creative digital skills. It also brings relevance to what they do and gives them purpose behind why they’re studying computing.
We also deliver esports tournaments, we run I believe the country’s largest school-based esports tournament. For us, that’s a method of careers education. Rather than talk to the children about a career, we throw them into the middle of it. We let them experience it firsthand.
There are so many careers within video games that I think are invisible to the average consumer, especially if you’re a child. I think it’s really difficult to be inspired by something you don’t even know exists. You can’t put yourself into the position of a technical artist if you don’t even know that career is a thing.
So that’s what we seek to do. We try to make those invisible careers visible, and we recognise that the best way to get through to a child is to help them experience it for themselves.
Do you see an evolution over time of the skills that you need to keep teaching for future opportunities?
As you go through, you start to deepen the learning. With younger children, you will start off quite broadly and high-end conceptual, the mechanics of the game or the art of the game. And then with each educational phase, you’re diving deeper, you’re helping to embed more technical skills. You’re showing them how the different disciplines are interacting with each other and helping them understand that games are in the vast majority of cases developed by teams of people working together.
It’s as much about technical skills as it is about softer skills?
t’s about both, absolutely. If we look at where we are with children and education, we fundamentally need to develop both. The technical skills are really important. Children, on a technical level, need to be able to get up to a certain level of foundational expertise if we’re going to get them to specialise in the world of careers later on.
But absolutely, one of the things that is so fundamentally important are the soft skills. “Soft skills” doesn’t seem a nice way to describe them because I feel like it devalues what they are. Someone once described them to me as “smart skills”. I really like that term.
The resilience, the collaboration, the ability to be able to take on critical feedback - all of those aspects of working and those lifelong skills which we know industry is telling us the next generation, or the current new entry into the workforce, really needs.
Especially with AI?
Absolutely. Creativity is not going away. If we think about where we are with technology continuing to evolve, now you can get generative AI producing code. I met someone the other day that’s producing a platform predominantly programmed through AI, for example. But the bit that the AI can’t produce is the creativity. This individual is the driver that knows how and when to master the AI, what they’re going to do, what they’re producing. It’s that human creative vision and innovation. And that’s what we need to emphasise and nurture amongst our students.
That’s what I like about games, because it allows you to tap into so many of those skills.
If you’re looking at the recent curriculum and assessment review that the government produced, there’s this recognition now that oracy is a skill that also needs to be nurtured amongst our children. That’s been something we’ve been doing through Digital Schoolhouse for a while. The esports tournament’s been running since 2016. Alongside it, since 2016, we’ve also awarded a trophy not just to the national champions, but to the best shoutcaster of the tournament.
In some of our other events and activities, we have professional shoutcasters delivering commentary workshops to ten-year-olds. When you see how the students receive those and how the teachers receive those, they talk about increased confidence. They talk about students developing their oral skills and their public-speaking skills.
These are so valuable because it enables a student to be able to speak up and express themselves. Which is important, not just because it’s important to be able to express yourself; but as a teacher, I’m relying on the feedback you’re giving me as a student to help me understand what’s inside your brain.
Something you’ve spoken about before is about being frustrated by dry rote learning approaches. What have you seen in classrooms that really convinced you that play would work better?
This comes back to my days as a teacher. I loved teaching. I still love teaching. But I guess that’s one of the reasons I left teaching to join Ukie, because I got free rein to be creative.
When you are a computing teacher, you are taught to teach computing in a computer lab, basically. But when you’re teaching computing and digital skills, there are not just the technical skills; there is the theory as well.
When I got my job in my first school, they decided that the theoretical aspects would be taught in a non-computing suite. So, there were no computers. There were just tables and chairs and kids sitting in front of you. And I looked at that and thought: I don’t know where to begin. This is not what I’ve been trained to do.
I said, “How do I do this?” They said, “Well, you talk to the children, you write notes on the board, they copy your notes, and then you ask them some questions and they answer the questions.” And I’m like, “That’s it? There’s got to be more to it than that.”
It felt like there was a massive component to this teaching thing that was missing. So, I decided to observe other subjects and other teachers and other schools. And in a lot of the cases you were finding that same thing. There’s a teacher explaining, there’s children making notes. Whether a child was happy, excited and fully engaged depended on the charisma of the teacher. That was the problem: the engagement.
That’s what led me to thinking there’s got to be something else. I started researching, experimenting and exploring. It was one particular lesson which was the epiphany moment, this is the bit that I’m missing. I had to teach public and private key encryption to an A-level, Year 12 class. I came across the work of Dr Tim Bell, who’s based in New Zealand, and he used locked boxes, padlocks and a bar of chocolate to explain public and private key encryption. I watched it once and it was a jaw-dropping moment. It just blew my mind. I thought, “Yes, yes, I get it!” So, I thought, ‘Can I do this myself?’ And I did. And the children just got it.
What this style of constructive kinaesthetic learning does is it creates a middle step where you’re getting to grips with the topic with your hands. That helps you craft that mental model. It helps you put together the jigsaw puzzle of this concept so much easier. That’s the difference between why I think that sort of dry, rote learning really is a thing of the past, because this is how we learn as human beings. It’s more enjoyable as well.
Fun for me is a fundamental part of education. Having fun is fundamental because, as human beings, we are driven to experiences we find enjoyable, and there doesn’t need to be any more motivation than that. I enjoy doing this. I want to do it. And so, if we can make our education fun, you deepen and increase the chances of children sticking with it.
What has the reception been from schools, and from parents who might see games as a distraction or frivolous?
The traditionalist views on education and what education should be still prevail. In the beginning, I’m not going to lie, there was scepticism about these approaches.
When we were delivering our workshops, you would have visiting primary teachers expecting the children to go straight to sit in front of a computer. And when instead we were getting them into the middle of the room to do some dancing or to do some magic tricks, they thought I’d lost it a little bit.
But when you take people through that experience, that’s when the penny drops and the realisation hits. It’s like: you’re not mad. You know what you’re talking about. I get this now. And not only do I get it, but this was fun, and I think I could do it again, and I think I will do it again. It creates that perception shift and changes that mindset. The Digital Schoolhouse experience has become our USP and is quite experiential.
How do you convince the parents?
When we carried out our research and evaluation, children were going home, they’d had such an exciting day and it was such an unexpected experience, but in a pleasant way, that they were sharing their experiences in the playground and then sharing their experiences at home.
We’ve had feedback where children have gone home and replicated the learning with their younger siblings because they enjoyed that magic trick so much. They now understand data representation or they understand that bit of programming, and they want to go back and do some more.
When we look at our esports tournament, we often find parents engaging with that as well. They’re seeing the impact of the work at home. They’re seeing their child engage.
Quite often, the parents that have been the most vocal are the ones whose child maybe has an element of neurodiversity, or they may be the quieter child in school. They’ve really noticed a difference in their child’s behaviour and their confidence levels at home.
It does create an equal playing field, doesn’t it, no matter the ability of the child?
We speak to the teachers directly, and the impact is profound and transformative.
We’ve heard stories where you’ve had students whose stutter is so bad they can’t engage in class discussion, and then the teacher is observing them at one of our knockout events, observing this child taking part in the commentary, and they’re not stuttering once.
We’ve had children who have been victims of bullying, who have been on suicide watch, and the feeling of participating in our esports tournament has had such a profound effect on their self-esteem and confidence that they stood up to the bullies.
They’re finding their way back to the light, so to speak. They’re much happier in school, and then that has a marked improvement on their grades. We’ve had disengaged students who are now getting GCSE qualifications in English because they are attending school and taking part in their speaking assessments because they’re able to hook it into our esports tournament.
What myths do young people or parents or teachers have about working in the games industry, and around the skills that you can learn as you play that can help you into careers?
There are two that are quite common that you hear from parents and sometimes children. The first is about video games being a hobby. [According to Ukie] the UK games industry is worth about £8 billion to the economy. That’s not just a hobby. That’s a livelihood. That’s a profession. It’s a serious business and a career path.
The other one you often hear predominantly from students is: “I’d like to work in games, but I really don’t like programming, so I can’t.” They limit themselves and associate games with programming.
Yes, of course, programming is a huge discipline within the games sector. But there are so many other disciplines, whether it’s storytelling, art, whether it’s organising people or just speaking. Whatever your passion, there’s a place for you in the industry. There’s lots of different opportunities and routes.
What more could the industry be doing to play a bigger role in education?
I think there’s always space for industry to engage. It’s recognising that the people you want to employ tomorrow, those people are sitting in classrooms today. And so if you want to get the best out of your future workforce, today is the day we need to start planting those seeds and help nurture that growth.
If we’re going to make our industry better, we need a diverse representation of people making our games that reflect the consumer base. And so the best way to do that is to reach out to those people and find them where they are now. And that is schools.
Reach out to your local school. If you’re in industry and there’s a school down the road, contact them.
Quite often schools and educational institutions do want to engage with industry but don’t know how and don’t know if industry would be interested. If people are not sure about how they want to engage, you can reach out to us at Ukie. That’s what we’re here for. Digital Schoolhouse has always been described as a bridge between industry and the classroom.
Industry is innovating all the time. Something completely profound. That exciting thing that you are working on will turn the light bulb on for so many students, it will inspire so many of them.
Everybody’s got a story to share. If you’re working in industry, if you’re a narrative designer, tell me how you make stories. How did you craft the story behind your game? Where did you come up with that idea? How can somebody else do this? These are all things that are just everyday knowledge for the people in our industry, so much so that they don’t give it a second thought. But these are pivotal learning tools for children. And I want to get that knowledge into the hands of the children. So, help me do it.
It’s about helping the industry realise what they can share and what’s so special about what they do?
We run Festival of Play, which is a tech conference for 9-14-year-olds. Think of your standard conference. Now take away the coffee and put in lots of ice cream. You’ll have the keynote. You’ll have the workshop streams. You’ll have the exhibitor area. But the entire focus is targeted at 9-14-year-old children, and it helps them learn computing in a different way. It helps them see the relevance of what they’re learning in school with the world of work and the world of careers.
The exhibitor areas get them engaging one-on-one with the people behind the tech.
It’s allowing children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds who have less access to these resources, less access to the technical equipment and less access to the industry experts, to bridge that gap between disadvantaged students and the industry.
And for us, with any events that we do, yes, we’re supporting the children. But the thing is, if I have ten children in front of me, I’m helping ten children. But if I have ten teachers in front of me, I’m helping an exponential number of children. You’re giving the teachers the tools and the resources for them to take that knowledge and what they’ve learned, and they will use it not just for the children they’re teaching today, but for the children they’re teaching tomorrow and next week and in three years down the line.
If every school embraced one idea of a Digital Schoolhouse, what would you want it to be?
I think the devices and the technology we see in front of us, they are tools, and tools will be whatever you wield them to be. The magic comes from the creativity and the innovation from the human that is wielding that tool.
So, creativity and innovation are key pillars that must remain part of our education system, but not just the education system, but our home environments and how we’re nurturing our children.
Technology is growing so fast, faster than education systems can keep up. We can’t have an education system where we think that is a skill set this child needs in ten years, because we don’t know. And the fact that we don’t know is the only constant. The disruption is the only constant. We know it’s going to be a disrupted future.
What we must teach our children is the ability to be creative, be innovative, to embrace challenge, to be resilient and to be adaptable, to be able to adapt, to change, to be able to make sense of the world around them, the shifting landscape and to be able to see the opportunities and grasp them and to do so confidently. I think those are things that Digital Schoolhouse fundamentally, through our approach to education, aims to do.
What would it take to get Digital Schoolhouse into every school in the UK?
One of the things that makes Digital Schoolhouse so successful amongst schools is the fact that we don’t charge. Schools that apply to join the programme in order to deliver workshops don’t pay to join the programme. They don’t pay for the training. They receive a financial bursary to support their delivery costs.
We’ve got 70 schoolhouses across the country. They support somewhere in excess of 500 schools between them because it’s like a hub-and-spoke model. So, we’re supporting about 500 schools annually at least. None of those 500-plus schools that attend a physical, in-person workshop pay for that workshop or the resources or anything else that goes with it.
The reason we can apply that model is because we are funded by industry and government. So, what would help us get into 100% of schools across the country? To be completely frank and brutally honest. It’s the funding to be able to reach every school in the country. We currently have coverage for about 77% of the schools in the UK. Our goal is to try and get to 100% by 2030. We know there are gaps, and we would love to work with people, partners and organisations that can help us reach those gaps.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Shahneila Saeed – ‘Digital Schoolhouse: Teaching Smart Skills Through Games’ - on the Good Game Club podcast here Good Game Club Podcast - YouTube.
