School Computing Discussion

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 [...]

There are many reasons why Shaun the Sheep on Scratch is appealing to students and to teachers, but as an IT professional the thing that stands out to me is the use of design patterns (the structure of the code) that haven't been widely evident in the Scratch teaching resources I've looked at.  It appears to me that the structuring of code is less well covered in exam specifications than logical control processes, and if that's true, then we are missing an opportunity to create elegant, efficient code. So what's so significant about the code structure in the Aardman Shaun projects? [...]

I suppose it's obvious - children like playing with toys.  You see it with PowerPoint: as soon as you show anyone the animation facilities, they want to do things just because they can.  It's the same with Scratch.  Because the possibilities are endless, it's all too easy for children to make sprites perform bizarre tricks, rather than learning useful skills. The answer, of course, is an understanding of the things children need to learn to be able to program.  This online presentation gives a good summary of the four commonly-accepted steps in computational thinking: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithm design. [...]

I found myself saying this to a Head Teacher recently, and it made me stop to think.  It followed a discussion about a student teacher who had prepared a Flowol lesson for Year 4, and was surprised when the children blasted out of the end of the prepared lesson and through his extension activities.  He was surprised how quickly they 'got it'. "If they can read, they can program", I said to the Head, discussing the situaton afterwards: it was an off-the-cuff remark, but it does make me reflect on the appropriate age to start introducing programming languages into the curriculum, [...]