“I CALL this a playground,” says Vinay Patel, gesturing to a score of monitors in the computer lab of Avanti House School in North London: “I tell pupils not to be scared of mistakes.” The two dozen teenagers in his classroom are among the first to follow a radically reformed technology curriculum which comes into force this month. But they are not the only ones learning new tricks. Though his background is in product design, Mr Patel has spent the summer grappling with Python and Java, two computer languages he will teach as part of the course.
