Bradley Mavin, Director of Design & Digital Technologies here at Brisbane Montessori School, takes us on a journey through the evolution of coding, the problem-solving behind it, and what happens when curious students are given the freedom to create, experiment and discover for themselves.
Over to you Bradley…
In 1986, I was eleven, and the most exciting thing in my bedroom was a Dick Smith VZ300 plugged into a black-and-white TV that ate half the desk. 16kb of memory. BASIC 2.0.
I learned to code from a handbook full of programs that didn't work, typos and bugs the book had printed and never fixed, so the only way to make anything run was to read the code, understand it, and repair it myself. No internet. No tutorials. Just me and a blinking cursor, staying up too late to find out why line 40 kept crashing.
Forty years later, the language has changed, but the feeling hasn't. On a Monday afternoon, when the 3.15pm bell has gone, and the classroom deck is empty, the members of the coding club haven't moved. On their screens there's no colourful app and no drag-and-drop blocks, just a black window, a blinking green cursor, and Python waiting for a command.
They started last term at the very bottom, in the terminal, learning to make the computer hold on to data: storing information in lists, adding to them, deleting from them, pulling pieces back out. They learned about variables too, the little named boxes you can put a value in and change whenever you like, so that the same piece of code can behave a hundred different ways depending on what you feed it. It sounds dry until you realise it's the whole game. From those few ideas they built a calculator that actually calculated, random number generators, quizzes that marked their own answers, and text adventures that sent the player through a mysterious house, every "if you open the door, turn to… " written as real code, by them.
This is the good kind of hacking, the original kind, from long before the word turned up on the news. It just means being curious enough, and stubborn enough, to make a machine do something clever. And when it breaks, and it breaks constantly, nobody hands them the answer. A missing bracket, a loop that keeps going, a variable spelt two different ways.
They read the error, they work out what the machine is actually telling them, and they fix it. That's the part I recognise most. A student who can read what the computer is telling them isn't mystified by it, and a person who isn't mystified is a lot harder to fool. It's also the same stubborn, satisfying puzzle I was chasing on that little black-and-white TV, just with a better language and forty more years of good ideas underneath it.
In the Jacaranda studio we're moving into graphics to build something ambitious: our own version of Asteroids, the arcade game from 1979.
Which, if you're keeping track, means a room full of students in Fig Tree Pocket in 2026 is about to rebuild a game older than their teacher's first computer, and they can't wait.
To learn more about our authentic Montessori curriculum from birth to 18 years, please click here.