Youth, Technology, and the Cool Factor

On LinkedIn, Bill Gates asked an interesting question.

How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?

There were many beautiful and eloquent responses, touting the need for youth to be engaged in solving the problems of the future, and how folks like Barrack Obama and Bill Gates were shining examples inspiring youth to take up that charge.

I am going to go out on a limb here.

We can talk about "the problems of the future" and "technology" and "science" until we're blue in the face. But that's only going to captivate a small slice of the pie. Granted, it might be the slice that's naturally geared towards computers anyway, but in my mind, you want to grab as much of that pie as you possibly can, to plumb the rest of them to find out if they have latent talent that they don't even realize is there.

Look around you at the youth of today. Science, technology, the environment, Web Applications, and all the things that interest us are not foremost on their minds. What is on their minds is fun, excitement and the cool factor.

Apple knows this.

And please, don't take that as an Apple Fanboi comment. I am most certainly not an Apple Fanboi. I am an ardent believer in the No Silver Bullet tenet. I've been working with Microsoft technologies for 18 years now, and still swear by them. But clearly, Apple is the winner when it comes to cool unless you're talking about desktop games. The iPod, the iPhone, OSX--they simply get out of the user's way and let them get to work and be cool when they want to do something.

Can we honestly say that about the Windows platform?

What Microsoft can do, and the technology industry in general, is make science, technology, and the problems of the future cool and fun to work on. Make it uncool not to be doing those things.

That means less emphasis on the geekiness, less technobabble, less bombarding everyone with acronyms that baffle even the most experienced developers.

Youth are excited by music, color, style, action, and the ability to do things with their friends. They're not typically excited by sitting alone in a darkened room, writing reams of code while munching on Cheetos.

You want to get youth involved in technology and science? Make it appealing to them at their level. Cut the costs associated with pursuing it for one. Higher education is simply too damned expensive. And then, change our fundamental approaches to it in school. I don't know about you, but Biology and Physics courses and my junior high school years were enough to put me in a zombie state. There was zero excitement. And I'm a science nut.

Appeal to youth; absolutely, appeal to youth. We need them. They ARE the future. Without them, we're doomed. But capture their enthusiasm early, and do it in ways that are sure to capture their imagination. Pie charts, timelines, Bunsen burners, Periodic Tables of the Elements...yeah, that's not working to capture their attention.