Monthly Archives: June 2014

I had a meeting with the new Computing subject leader at my primary school the other day, and I thought it gave some interesting insights into the new curriculum, so I thought I'd report some of it here.  We concentrated on the Computer Science elements of the Computing curriculum, as the staff are already familiar with the other streams of work.  I am increasingly convinced that, at primary level, having a single computing expert in the school is counterproductive, because it discourages other teachers from getting involved in the computing curriculum, so our objective was to start structuring a curriculum that [...]

For those of you who read Douglas Adams, it's obvious that 42 is the answer.  To life, the universe, and everything. But teaching computing?  What's perhaps less well known is that Douglas Adams wrote extensively about technology in newspapers and magazines, and a number of his writings were collected after his death into 'The Salmon of Doubt' (book or Kindle), a fascinating read for many reasons.  The discussion that made me start drafting this entry appears in several of the articles, including a lecture he gave in 1998 about God.  I'm not going to discuss the philosophical discussion behind it, but [...]

I had a wake-up call recently, sitting in the staffroom at my local primary school, having just finished my weekly computing lesson with year 6.  Building on my earlier comment that 'if they can read, they can program', I off-handedly asked the EYFS teacher if she fancied trying out a computing activity to introduce a precise sequence of instructions (i.e. an algorithm).  A more experienced teacher laughed, and said, "You have no idea!  I'd like to see you try to teach computing when one of the children walks up and says 'I've just done a poo in my pants' !". It [...]