If Prof. Brian Cox can make understanding physics cool, how can we do the same for technology & IT?

I completely miss the point you’re trying to make with the penultimate paragraph.

The person who gets away with being the most confrontational is the person best suited? Why? Or are you suggesting that only atheists should have a contribution to educating people with regards to science/computer science? If so, your attitude is rather immature. I think Tim O’Reilly (a church-going Christian), Jeff Bezos (ditto) and closer to home Imran Ali (Muslim) have all added to the education of numerous people, and can’t see how their pedagogical actions have been impacted by their faith.

I’ve got to disagree in other terms with your point on Brian Cox: with the exception of a small group of females who are somehow attracted to his gargoyle-esque face, I think he’s done more in way of creating a satirical point of obsession than increased interest in science education. I’ve met him and in person he’s quite a sociable person. His colleagues at Manchester might wish he’d get a bit more real work done, but otherwise seem to like him. In the wider community though, he’s a bit of a Marmite personality: whilst there are some who love him (especially those who have a crush/boy-crush on him), there are a *lot* of people who really dislike him, and I personally find his programs shallow, breathless, “tabloid science” that has borne absolte no evidence whatsoever of getting more kids to continue science education post-16. Talking to non-geeks about him, the general attitude is that he’s disliked and his programmes are to be avoided. Not good.

That doesn’t mean we should give up though. I’ve done a lot of work with STEMnet which has had a demonstrable impact – especially on female students – and needs to be built upon. There is a pile of work to be done in terms of educating the educators and to provide really good quality teaching materials for self-paced learning to happen.

However, I think on the wider point, I’d broadly agree except that it’s very difficult to make audiences connect with the – by definition – abstract science that is CS. In essence, CS is applied maths, and therefore we already have a potential successful presenter in the wings (Marcus du Sautoy), if a TV programme really was the best answer, but if you’re thinking we’re going to have some kind of latter-day 1980s “program along at home” TV show, I think you’re mistaken. It just wouldn’t work. A better angle of attack might be a YouTube channel which builds up on some simple foundations, and takes it from there.

But I can’t stress this enough: content is king. The choice of presenter really isn’t, no matter how much you have a boy crush on them, and when you look at the content of Cox’s vehicles objectively, it’s absolutely awful from the perspective of getting kids interested in understanding real science and persuing it. Finding another Brian Cox but with a CS degree and getting them to talk in completely abstract nonsense in primetime isn’t going to improve the standard of CS education in the UK. Lots of other ideas have a better chance of succeeding there.

Quite what is wanted, needed, is the first thing to get clear. Do we want cool? Is ‘cool’ enough? Or do we want an outcome, and end result that we can then marshal all the resources, talents and skills we need to achieve? We need a strategic objective.

That objective should be something like- by 2020 everyone under the age of 20 should have a passing understanding of the principles of logical computation, an understanding of the critical importance of said principles in the development and implementation of digital technology in the modern world, and a core cultural respect for the importance of the skills and knowledge in themselves and their peers that can make and remake the modern world, society and their own culture through digital technology.

And it needs to be shorter and fit on a t-shirt.

The familiarity and utility of programming needs to be a part of infant education- reception and pre school need elements that introduce fundamental concepts of logical causality.

At infant level tools like LOGO should be a part of the learning environment so that the real world analogue of mathematical constructs of geometry and arithmetic and logic become ludic. They are to be games- learning frameworks, as crucial as pencils and paper.

The rant goes on. And no one tool is the silver bullet.

Yes and no to your second-to-last paragraph. Ok, no-one who seriously believes the world is going to end in 2012 is going to agree with Brian Cox about anything anyway, so he’s not lost anything by calling them twats. But he doesn’t make calling people twats his modus operandi, and there’s a reason for that.

In general, people like to be flattered, and want to flatter others, thereby inspiring reciprocal flattery. They also want to belong to something, or contribute to something, bigger than themselves, because that is what gives life meaning. IMO those are the instincts you appeal to in order to sell an area of (difficult, technical) knowledge. What people like Cox are really great at doing is suggesting that, if his viewers just make a little bit of effort with his knowledge area, he will be genuinely and personally delighted about it and the world will be a better place as a result; they will be contributing, as he sees it, to the most important cause on earth. I think he really believes that. There is no ego there, and that’s the basis of his appeal.