Educator Gary McNab vividly recalls a brief conversation he recently had with a four-year-old pupil. “I was visiting a primary school and he turned to me and said, ‘Gary, have you come from the 1980s?’” Yet the question wasn’t entirely bizarre.
McNab was attending the school armed with a bunch of computers from that decade along with other machines from the 1970s to the 1990s. “I replied to him, ‘yes, I’ve come back to the future in my Sinclair C5’,” he laughed. And the response contained more than a grain of truth.
McNab is no time-traveller (or at least we don’t think he is), but he has been bringing the past to life under the banner of The Code Show. This an organisation he set up with the aim of introducing a new generation of children to computing history.
His work entails delivering workshops in schools in which he shares memories of what it was like growing up in an era when home computing was no longer a pipe dream. He also explains how the machines helped to bring about technological, social and cultural change and he uses them to teach vital skills such as coding and design.
All of this, he told, is not only going down a storm with pupils, it’s filling a hole in school curriculums. “I feel it’s crucially important for children to understand not only our
