About

Our kids are digital natives. Our 8 year olds can’t remember life before iphones, the four year olds can’t conceive of life without an iPad. They are immersed in digital media and it is as invisible to them as radio waves were to our grandparents. But what exactly are they learning about the digital world? What are the skills they will need to thrive in such a new and highly connected environment?

Schools are struggling to adapt to their needs, ICT in the curriculum is in limbo and teachers cannot keep pace with the technologies that children have at their fingertips. Meanwhile the economic and social needs of our communities mean that this generation must grasp the nettle of the opportunities that new technologies offer.

What our children need is a chance to try new things, build new skills and connect them back into the learning system that will inhabit for the next ten years… What they need is a digital natives afterschool club.

We have started by talking to the headteacher at our kids’ school about the idea. Not surprisingly he said ‘yes yes yes’.

We are members of our PTA and we have talked to the wonderful people who run the Afterschool clubs what our children attend. These are the places where the school community interacts with the wider world, it is where the curriculum is casts a shadow but doesn’t dominate, and it is where outsiders can begin to influence and share knowledge and experience with children, teachers and other parents.

We know that this idea will be planted in fertile ground and can be grown and take root in ways which we cannot even conceive, but it must come from outside the system and be sustainable outside the confines of the school’s resources.

We can be agents of change – we have a chance to build something that can transform the learning of the digital natives in our city.

Now we need what every start up needs. We need to focus our efforts on a pilot phase, learn from what has been tried before, give the kids the space to dictate the best ways to learn, build a network of talented people to offer their time and energy, grow an organisation that can use the power of digital to scale up and reach out to every digital native in every school.

So, we need all that CityCamp and Brighton is good for in terms of people, ideas, connections and expertise. And we need the money to get things going.

Matt Gould and Mark Walker

Digital Native Afterschool Clubs