Graeme: My role here at Mountain Creek High School is Head of Department for Coding and Innovation. The school has recognised there is a need for a brand new faculty in support of the Education Departments initiative, ‘Coding Counts’. The initiative focuses on the need for all students in Years 7 to 10, and beyond, to develop skills in coding, robotics, STEM generally, and the applications of those to real world problems, it’s all around taking a problem in the real world and solving it using some electronic means. 

A lot of statistics say that in the next 5 years, up to 40 percent of current jobs will disappear through automation, [SOURCE: Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA)] so the big push for us in robotics, and education generally, is to make sure that kids have developed the skillsets they’ll need to make use of those new jobs that are going to come around. We don’t expect every kid to be a programmer, we do expect every student to leave high school with a good understanding of how programming and coding and robotics generally can be used in their chosen field.

Shane: The next generation, in the world that they are going to grow up with the jobs are going to be in building autonomous robots, programming autonomous robots and the kids that get into this now are definitely going to be a step in front of the rest of the generation that don’t. They say that about 80 percent of the traditional jobs we have now won’t exist in 20 years’ time, so for me I really want to encourage my kids to learn this and get into this to actually have a head start on everyone else out there, and they love it.