BBC Technology , and with it the interwebs, has been buzzing with the realisation that Computer Science Education in English Schools is woeful, and that while in Scotland we have got as far as recognizing some of the deficiencies (see Ewan Macintosh and The Curriculum for Excellence) things are still far from rosy even north of the border. I profess to ignorance of the situation in Wales and NI.

The NESTA Next Gen report recognizes that Computer Science is intellectually fundamental, but spoils its point by focusing on arguing for very vocational "industry relevant" "specialist training". In other words, it argues as a special interest group asking for public support to make its life easier.

What Computer Science (NOT just coding) is, is closer to physics or biology. It picks apart the fundamentals of how computing systems work, and builds a coherent theory of how they work, and what you can and can't do with them. Once you know that, thehn you undertand what you can do by coding. For analogy, physics picks apart the physical universe and builds a coherent theory of how it works and what is or isn't possible (well, it's trying anyway). It also happens that Computer Science benefits tremendously from the underpinnings of diverse branches of mathematics to build its theories. And these theories aren't just intellectual frippery. They allow us to build robust, large scale computing systems, and to demonstrate with confidence that they do what we say they do. That's Software Engineering. A shout out here to Britain's presiding genius of the 20th Century, Alan Turing, who basically figured all this out about computers as a thought experiment, and then set about inventing and building them.

Lest the NESTA authors get cross with me, I completely agree that the fields of computer science and art and design are complementary, and that building great products in the modern age requires enormous crossover between these areas. But the fact that art and design can be appreciated and understood by an educated lay person making an effort, makes it easier to promote and support than a field which demands that you go away and study some ostensibly pointless maths for a long time before coming back and understanding how it all connects together.

So to the extent that the Latin analogy has merit, it is that the rigorous study of the abstruse has ultimately unexpected and wide ranging benefits in the everyday. I'm not convinced that Latin is particularly special that way, but that's the folkloric belief about it in the kind of places that study Latin.

Mathematics and Physics and Engineering. Oh my! Now we get it. These are subjects which in the UK are not fashionable. They are not the bread and circuses of X-Factor talent, nor the true routes to power and influence of The Law and PPE. So it's perhaps not surprising that young people being asked to stump up large sums of money to purchase a higher education aren't buying the rhetoric about how nice it would be for them to study very very hard to become trained workers with industry relevant expertise, when the rewards to them don't quite seem commensurate with the effort required.

So if this country wants to take on Silicon Valley, and become part of a thriving knowledge economy, it's going to need to rebalance itself in ways which recognise how important it is to support and sustain the people who find the subject sufficiently interesting to want to study it. That way at the margin it will produce sufficiently greater numbers of future generations of Computer Scientists and good Computer Science teachers (at all levels of the education system) which will make such a knowledge economy self-sustaining and self-replicating. And at present we are an awful long way from that societal shift.

The last few days have been spent attending the Turing Festival on Friday, and a quick trip to meet up with some OSM folks at State of the Map Scotland on Saturday.

Earlier in the summer, Sustrans release their iPhone App, which we were very pleased to develop on their behalf. The app distinguishes itself in using the Ordnance Survey derived Sustrans mapping; for many applications in the UK, the accuracy and clarity of OS mapping is unsurpassable.

Having built a framework for presenting OS mappings within iPhone apps, we're now very pleased to be working on a similar framework for Android, and our first customer project using this is planned for release later in 2011.

The Turing Festival has been covered widely, it's a valiant attempt to integrate the Scottish Tech community with the Festival of Festivals that is Edinburgh in August. I only had time to attend the business track on Friday, and while there were some excellent talks, as well as one that annoyed me immensely in its techno-utopian shallowness, it came off much more as a conventional biz conference event that happened at the same time as the festival than a "festival" per se. I think it would be hard to be more on a first attempt, but I'd love to see someone try. Could one address the work of Turing or Gödel in something of the way of Copenhagen ?

State of the Map is the annual gathering of people interested in the OpenStreetMap project. Over the last decade, this project has mapped large parts of the world co-operatively and openly, producing an array of data and tools which provide geographical insight and some amazing possibilities. The CycleStreets project and its smartphone apps are in large part possible because of the existence of OSM as both usable data and as a map for overlaying route images. Whereas the database that goes to build Ordnance Survey maps is proprietary, in OSM it is free in the sense of open.

We’ve just released the new RoutePics app.

We would like to improve and enhance RoutePics in future, in the ways that would best please our users. Which of these features would you prefer to see ?

• GPS route tracking (in the iPhone) version, and uploads to GPSies, strava, Endomondo or any of the other route repositories ?
• More control of how the photos are selected (e.g. by tag) rather than just selecting the most recent ?
• More details of routes ?
• The ability to track your position while following a route ?

If these or other features interest you, please review the app on the app store, comment here, or speak to us on twitter @isomalyapps.

My son was invited to a party in a part of the world we don’t know well, with instructions that the house (newly built last summer) was “not on the map.” Not on Google Maps, it wasn’t, but I tapped the address into the namefinder on my CycleStreets app, and the OSM-backed namefinder found it. Cue a stress free trip to party.

So my thanks to whoever surveyed new parts of Bonnyrigg recently, and once again to all the great folks who contribute to OSM. It’s an example of great technology which makes life that little bit easier.