While yesterday's children were called on to set up the household VHS player, today's kids are coding web and mobile applications to automate and control entire home entertainment systems.
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Students from Canberra Grammar School were showing off their application creations at the Apple Store on Friday, the product of a number of years of computer programming education from Matthew Purcell, perhaps better known to Canberra Times readers as The Silicon Kid.
As head of IT at the school, Mr Purcell started Code Cadets in 2011, a voluntary after-school activity for boys wanting to learn how to code programs.
''It became so popular that our head of school … asked if I wanted to move into full-time teaching of it. That's when we started our year 9 and 10 courses,'' Mr Purcell said.
''The boys enjoy doing it because it's practical - it's not a skill they learn for the sake of passing exams; it's a skill they can go out and use.''
Code Cadets is still run for year 7 and 8 students, with one member, Damian Camilleri, using the Apple Store field trip to demonstrate his application to control all aspects of home entertainment through a website.
''Once I tried [Code Cadets] out the first week, it was like this is what I want to do, this is my career,'' Damian said. Canberra Grammar is one of only a few schools in the ACT to incorporate industry-standard coding and app development into their curriculum, and parents are also seeing the benefits.
Year 11 students Joshua Whitcombe and Samuel Moore showcased iPhone apps that can scan a barcode and estimate when the product will expire, and one that translates dietary information.
Sharon Moore said the course transformed her ''quiet teenager'' into a passionate, hard-working learner with ''phenomenal ambition to go places with IT''.
''It seems to be a bit of a niche - it's a new language, it's a bit like learning Russian or Martian - but if they can crack the code and work with it, they've got really unique skills,'' she said.
It may sound like Martian, but the languages they are learning to use - including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP MySQL, Python, Objective-C and C - are the languages powering our digital world.
Mr Purcell said finding qualified teachers probably prevented more schools from incorporating coding.
''If you're a reasonably good programmer, you can go out into the industry and earn a six-figure amount of money rather than a school-teacher salary,'' he said.
