If you’re concerned that young children won’t be able to grasp computing concepts, or are worried about how you’re going to teach it, have a look around the Literacy from Scratch website.
Managed – and, I think, written by – Lawrence Williams, the website contains examples of pupils’ work in Scratch, cross-curricular ideas and examples, and notes on pedagogy.
Code Academy is an online tutorial-based website for teaching yourself how to code. You can select which programming language you wish to learn, from the following list
As usual, I gave this application a workout without seeking help from a manual or anything like that – which is just as well because there does not seem to be a comprehensive manual.
There are three applications in one: JIT5, LOGO and Visual. This is quite useful because if you are familiar with LOGO but not JavaScript, you can start pupils coding in an environment that is familiar to you. Also, if you teach very young children, JIT5 is highly visual and colourful.
An advantage of J2Code as a whole over 2Code is that it covers the age range from Key Stage 1 (5-6 year olds) to Key Stage 3 (13-14 year olds).
2Simple’s answer to the question “How can we teach coding to little ones?” is 2Code. The first thing that greets you when you go to the 2Code section of Purple Mash is the plethora of files to open.
Computer programming is the process of designing and writing computer programs. That is pretty straightforward, isn't it?
When, on my teacher training course, I was told I had create a resource to be used in school, I thought it would be fun to devise a programmed learning guide to the economic concepts of absolute and comparative advantages. Unfortunately, that was in 1974. Word processors were not yet ubiquitous, and home computers had not yet been invented. That came a year or two later. In any case, when I finally did get my hands on a word processor, courtesy of a friend of mine on my MA course, it was slo-o-o-o-o-w.I like a challenge so I thought I’d try to create a self-marking spreadsheet in Excel. (Look, some men like fast cars, some like sport, and some like womanising. Me? I like spreadsheets. OK?)
I was inspired to have a go at this by someone called Lee Rymill, who uploaded a self-marking spreadsheet to the CAS resources area. However, I wanted to take it a few steps further…
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Whatever you think of the current debate over news that the US Government may have been monitoring the online activity of not only its own citizens but those of other countries too, you have to admit one thing. It provides a great opportunity for ICT teachers everywhere to bring some real-world issues into their lessons, in a very newsy (ie current) way.
It’s amazing what you can achieve with a paintbrush and a fork. Yesterday morning I watched in helpless horror as the lid of something fell down the plug hole in the bathroom sink. I could see it, just about, using the flashlight app on my smartphone (I knew there was more to smartphones than just being connected), but couldn’t reach it.
It’s very tempting to try to make life as easy as possible for end users by being proactive, ie anticipating what is likely to be useful to them, and then implementing that as a default option (or possibly not even an option, but compulsory).
Perhaps some of your students will be tempted, when designing a computer program for use by non-technical people, to make it as ‘proactively helpful’ as possible. If so, they should beware. A good idea would be to undertake some market research, if only of a rudimentary nature, to avoid the pitfall of merely annoying people.
When a young man with dreams of becoming a writer sent a manuscript to Samuel Johnson for his opinion, Dr Johnson is reputed to have replied:
“My congratulations to you, Sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
I thought it might be interesting to look at 10 ideas that have gained popularity in the world of educational technology and ICT in recent years, to see if they meet the “good and original" test”. Here are my considered, though possibly opinionated, views.
Lord Puttnam said something every interesting at an E-Learning Foundation Conference. Having been a film producer, he said that up to about ten years ago, to be a successful cinematographer you had to be able to take a camera apart and put it together. Now, none of those sort of skills are required: you need a whole different set of skills in order to find employment in that occupation.
I believe a similar thing is true in the realm of “digital education”. Almost nobody needs a gasp of computer programming, and even fewer need to know how computers actually work.
Computer studies and its main component, programming, could be an exciting new addition to the curriculum. However, we must not repeat the mistakes of the 1980s, when the subject was, at least in my experience and in my opinion, insular, highly technical, and rightly perceived by some (especially girls) as “geeky”.Every so often, I’m tempted to do what I’ve seen other website/blog owners do, which is to insert some code that lists the most popular content on their website. But I can’t seem to be able to answer a very fundamental question:
What’s the point?
Last night I attended the Owers Lecture on the subject of "Can we reverse the decline in schools' computing, especially with girls?" (I'll report on this in due course.) As the group called Computing at School was mentioned a lot, I thought I'd reproduce the following article from the April 2009 issue of Computers in Classrooms. The conference mentioned has, obviously, been and gone, but I think it's worth retaining that information for the links and because the agenda is interesting in itself.
The group has recently produced a glossy magazine (insofar as a pdf can be described as 'glossy'!) and some teaching materials, which I intend to review.
My own interest in this (as it's now de rigeur to declare one's interest, however slight) is that I love messing about with programming, having dabbled in Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications. Indeed, my chapter in the Year 8 book in the ICT 4 Life series is all about addressing the sequencing aspects of the National Curriculum through the use of VBA in a spreadsheet.
There is a looming crisis in the world of computing, says Roger Davies.
As the speed of technological developments increases and with it the need for ever greater 
numbers of computer scientists, researchers and technologists the numbers opting to study computing in higher education have halved in the last ten years. There are many reasons; the image of the discipline, the lack of a coherent study pathway in secondary education, limited exposure to any computing before 16 to name just a few. Post 16 the numbers studying Computing are small. As a result, Computing teachers often feel isolated and face difficulties keeping up-to-date.
It is ironic that as ICT becomes increasingly ubiquitous, fewer children are being taught the fundamentals of computing, in particular programming. Bright students, of the kind who might make a career in computing, often progress in spite of, not because of, their school education.
Yet many children are curious about the technology we take for granted. They want to know how Google finds so many hits so quickly, and how it ranks them. How does an email get to its correct destination? How does file compression work? It is computing that gets i-tunes onto their mobiles, allows them to stream videos from across the world and buy things safely online.
In recent years, diverse groups of enthusiasts have sought to bring these concepts to life in a way that is understandable for children. For example Queen Mary College produce CS4Fn – a magazine aimed at secondary age pupils with a wonderful supporting website. Based at Glasgow University, Computer Science Inside have worked with teachers to develop a growing number of resources and in New Zealand the Computer Science Unplugged team have produced a marvellous collection of classroom activities to demonstrate computing concepts without the need for a computer.
If the thought of programming conjures up visions of blank faces staring at incomprehensible lines code it is time to rethink. There are many exciting resources that aim to introduce children to programming in enjoyable and engaging ways. GameMaker (developed at Utrecht University), Greenfoot, (Kent University), Scratch (MIT) and Alice from Carnegie Mellon are just some of the excellent free tools finding their way into schools.
The recent revision of the National Curriculum, with a new, welcome focus on sequencing provides an opportunity to replant the computing flag within our Key Stage 3 (11-14 years old) ICT provision. Computing has a rich and deep tradition and it is time for teachers to rediscover it. Programming teaches children the skills to dissect problems, understand the logic and sequences that lie behind solutions and be able to construct those solutions so a computer can execute them. These foundations provide generic and extendable skills that have value in many spheres beyond IT. As Nicolas Negroponte (architect of the OLC project) commented:
"Computer programming is a powerful tool for children to 'learn learning,' that is, to learn the skills of thinking and problem-solving... Children who engage in programming transfer that kind of learning to other things."
There is something special in pupils being able to get a computer to dance to their own tune. In my experience computing projects are highly motivational because of their capacity to make pupils think and stretch them. But above all else, they can be fun. One of my Year 9 (14-15 year old) pupils observed, on completing a unit using GameMaker:
“That was great. You normally teach the boring bits of my Mum’s job”.
‘Computing At School’ is an open, informal working group of enthusiasts that aims to promote Computing at school. Its membership is broad including teachers, examiners, parents, LEA advisors, university faculty, and employers. CAS was born out of our excitement with the discipline; a key goal being to put the fun back into teaching computing.
We would like to invite fellow teachers to an inaugural conference at Birmingham University on June 19th. Speakers will include Tim Bell (http://csunplugged.org/), Paul Curzon (http://www.cs4fn.org/), Michael Kölling (http://www.greenfoot.org) and Quintin Cutts (http://csi.dcs.gla.ac.uk/) amongst others. We hope this free event will provide an excellent opportunity to explore new ways to bring computing into our classrooms.
We hope the conference will provide a basis for creating an organization similar to the American Computer Science Teachers Association which has done much work to support teachers and promote a passion for computing. Please come and join us.
Further details about the conference and booking details can be found at http://computingatschool.org.uk/files/CAS_Conference_2009.pdf or by mailing conf2009@computingatschool.org.uk
Roger is Director of ICT, Queen Elizabeth School, Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria. He started the social network http://aqacomputing.ning.com/ which aims to provide a self help group for teachers involved in A Level Computing. He is a member of the CAS Working Group.
(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved