The Finns are pretty bemused by Americans’ preoccupation with whether to put iPads in every classroom. If a tablet would enhance learning, great. If it wouldn’t, skip it. Move on. The whole thing is a little tilting-at-windmills, anyway.
That was the gist of the conversation at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C. in 2017, where diplomats and experts gathered to celebrate the country’s education accomplishments as Finland turned 100. And Americans could stand to take notes. (Yes, from Finland—again.)
Coding and programming are now part of the curriculum in the Scandinavian country, and they’re subjects kids tackle from a young age. But unlike in some parts of the United States where learning to code is an isolated skill, Finnish children are taught to think of coding and programming more as tools to be explored and utilized across multiple subjects.
That mindset aims to accomplish a couple of things: to make coding and programming accessible to kids with a variety of interests, and to show students why understanding how technology works is relevant to their lives by linking its use to a multitude of activities.
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Liukas pushes back at the idea that children are already tech-savvy simply because they seem to be able to navigate an iPhone intuitively. She’s particularly fond of this quote from the American computing professor Mark Guzdial:
We want students to understand what a computer can do, what a human can do, and why that’s different. To understand computing is to have a robust mental model of a notional machine.
In other words, knowing how to use something isn’t the same as understanding how it works. And because programming can be taught in so many ways, Liukas said, it can be an opportunity for kids to learn lots of related skills, such as how to collaborate, how to tell a story, and how to think creatively.
“This demands a lot from the teachers, obviously,” Liukas said during a presentation at the embassy event. This is true in the sense that incorporating coding and programming lessons across disciplines requires all kinds of educators, from the science teacher to the art teacher, to understand the basics. But it’s also a manageable challenge in Finland because teachers there have more autonomy than American teachers when it comes to how and what they teach, and they aren’t constantly evaluated by how their students score on standardized tests.
