These junior coders are way ahead of Bill Shorten, Christopher Pyne and Australia's chief scientist Ian Chubb.

Last week the Labor leader announced that if elected, his government would make coding a mandatory part of the national curriculum. Education Minister Christopher Pyne followed on Tuesday, pledging to strengthen Australia's fledgling science, technology, engineering or maths (STEM) skills base along with bolstering investment in coding.

At the same time Amanda Hogan and her class of eight were making Professor Chubb proud, coding their way into the stratosphere.

From the age of 10, students at Tara Anglican girls school are learning how to make computer programs, by 13 they are developing their own apps and at 15 they are using those skills to get a small computer called a Raspberry Pi floating 20 kilometres above Earth snapping photos of space. 

Mrs Hogan sees coding as the future, particularly for her tech-savvy girls who huddle around laptops at lunch time each week telling computers what to do and how to do it.

"Breaking down problems into a solution is just a life skill, coding helps them understand those structures. Women are so under-represented in these tech fields, it is just never presented as an option and by the time they are old enough they may have already found their niche".

The reality is that it is not just women who are under-represented, Australia is as a whole.

We are not producing enough science and technology graduates to meet soaring demand.

In April, Business Council of Australia president Catherine Livingstone told the National Press Club that Australia is at risk of dramatically falling off the pace of the world's computer literacy standards.

According to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Australia stands to gain a $57.4 billion increase in GDP by shifting 1 per cent of the workforce into STEM-focused roles.

"The imperative for introducing these foundational skills into the primary and pre-primary curricula should be unassailable," Ms Livingstone said.

"As it stands in Australia the gap between the digital literacy of our young people and that of our competitor nations is increasing. If we want increased productivity and participation, we need urgently to embark on a 10-year plan to close that gap."

Academics have backed the calls from big-business for radical reform starting at the primary school level, where countries like Estonia and the United Kingdom lead the way.

"Many, many more people need to be exposed to coding at a young age," said Leon Sterling, the pro-vice chancellor of digital frontiers at Swinburne University. "Not everyone is going to become a coder, but they need to be exposed to the conceptual part so they understand how computers work at a basic level. This could help encourage future teachers to learn the fundamentals which they can take through life with them".

At the Balgowlah Boys Campus of Northern Beaches Secondary College, Ethan Low is one of those students who would have loved to have been taught to code at the same time as being taught to read.

"Coding is like writing a story, without the flow, essence and emotion it has no meaning, they are all just separate actions, but when you code it all together the program knows a beginning middle and an end".

The 14-year-old is busy programming lego robots to run riot around a classroom - a skill Australia hopes will take him and the country further, "My dream job is to be a robotic engineer," he said.

Want to learn how to code in HTML? Try this basic tutorial 

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