CBC viewers across Canada will soon learn how educational programs in Estonia and Finland are serving as the model for an experiment in computer education for Maritime schoolchildren.
The national broadcaster will soon present Code Kids, the collaborative work of Fredericton-based tech evangelist David Alston and Greg Hemmings, the founder of Hemmings House film studio in Saint John.
Not only will the documentary demonstrate the power of tech-nical education, but it also will be part of a movement to improve computer education at New Brunswick schools.
Alston, the chief innovation officer at Introhive, the Fredericton- and Washington-based relationship analytics company, began to work with Premier David Alward last year on a scheme to teach coding to children in New Brunswick grade schools. When he linked up with his old friend Hemmings, they developed a concept for a documentary on best practices for teaching the subject.
Hemmings House had recently completed a documentary called Sistema Revolution about the legendary music education program for children of all income levels in Venezuela.
He and Alston decided to apply the same approach to the tech project. They would find the best computer education programs in the world, which happened to be in Estonia and Finland, and use a documentary to display how they could be replicated domestically.
They learned that the two little European countries were leaps and bounds ahead of most of the world in teaching programming to schoolchildren.
Estonia in particular is famous for having made technology the centre of its economic progress since it was freed from the Soviet Union a quarter century ago.
Alston, Hemmings and a few others flew to the two countries last year to see what was happening.
“It just blew our minds,” said Alston in a recent interview. “It was amazing. We had so many, so many amazing interviews that we just had to share it all.”
The result is a documentary that reveals what is happening in Finland and Estonia, but more importantly what is starting to happen in Atlantic Canada.
Alward recently announced that Alston would work on a new educational initiative called Brilliant Labs, which encourages teachers throughout New Brunswick to adopt new strategies for teaching programming.
The goal is to produce a generation of computer-literate citizens who can compete in the modern economy.
The program seeks to find teachers and students who embrace top-level computer education and finance their projects in the hopes that their success attracts other teachers, schools and students.
“We need to nurture and fund a few of the most innovative teachers across our province,” said Alward at the recent R3 Gala in Fredericton.
“Just as we need to seed our best young startups, we need to see next generation of minds.”
Code Kids — excerpts of which can be found at codekids.ca — aims to display how a strong grounding in computer education can change a child’s life because of the abundant opportunities in the field.
“One of the major thrusts in this documentary is that we’ve identified that the opportunities are limited for our kids in Atlantic Canada,” said Hemmings.
“So we’re losing our kids. If you have the tool sets to do this, you can actually build something that will build a career for yourself right here in Atlantic Canada.”