Month: November 2017
Computing
Computing is a huge asset for any individual in the world today. As the national curriculum puts it, “a high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world” (2013, p.1). We gather from this the global and national significance it is to have our young people fully equipped to deal with the ever-growing technological world around them. In a world of cyber-terrorism, hacking and the like it is important for young people to not simply be passive consumers of technology, but active participants with critical knowledge of the languages and platforms used by different programmes. Though the amount of households connected to the Internet has increased significantly over the years, from 57% in 2006 to 90% in 2017, this does not necessarily mean that young people are learning how to use it (ONS, 2017). As well as the 10% of unconnected households, many households Internet use is solely an adult’s privilege or simply used for consumption rather than education.
During my first weeks in my placement school, it became very clear that some of these children had very limited access to computers. Simply using a mouse was a struggle for many of them. With these handicaps, many of the children were lost and left behind during ICT classes which for some was an opportunity to show their skills and for others a frustration at not being able to do what their counterparts were able to do on Scratch. I decided to work with a group of students who are among the lowest in ARE. These students are not only Pupil Premium students but also had been taken out of ICT classes in the past to work on other subjects. I chose the activity Animate Your Name from the Hour of Code website, as it is very similar to the activity that the class is expected to complete in ICT.
When teaching this activity I decided to have the activity already open for them on the computer. I asked them to log in and then come watch me go through the first part of the activity setting up the background and getting sprites for each letter in their name. By breaking down the activity into different stages I enabled all the students to follow along. It allowed me to focus on helping the students on one aspect at a time, allowing me to challenge those who I deemed could handle a little more and support those who couldn’t before we all moved on to the next stage together. We reconvened and went over any of their misconceptions or things they were getting stuck on. The students realised that through communicating as a group about what they were struggling with, they could help support each other’s learning. I then introduced changing one letter in one way explaining and modelling what could happen with changes in the sequence of instructions I gave the sprite. I then got them to try and reconvened again, going over what they had learned in terms of sequencing. I then introduced a new change and showed the children all the different possibilities. The children were then allowed to play around with all the possible transformations they could think of. Needless to say, by the end of the class, we all had very different things going on with our names. Some children put more emphasis on getting the background the way they wanted it whereas others just wanted to make all there letters do different things. We shared our learnings with each other and went over all the different things the students now knew how to do. The students were engaged and excited that they could have an influence on changing something both on the Internet and in relation to them. The students were then able to pass on this information to the rest of the class and catch problems that students may have had with their sequencing. This exemplified, in a small way, what Turvey, Potter and Burton say, that “once children are familiar with the basics of a programming language like Scratch they can be engaged in tasks that will require a deeper level of analysis and begin to challenge them to use computational thinking to a greater degree” (2016).
References:
Chapter 8 ‘Programming and computational thinking’ in Turvey, K. Potter, J. Burton, J. (2016) Primary Computing and Digital Technologies; Knowledge, Understanding and Practice, London: Sage, Learning Matters.
DfE (2013) Computing programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2 [Online].
[Accessed Nov. 25th, 2017]
Office for National Statistics (2017) Statistical bulletin: Internet access – households and individuals [Online].
[Accessed Nov. 25th, 2017]
Code.org UK (2015) Teacher-Led Hour of Code Lesson Plans – Scratch Animate Your Name
Available: https://scratch.mit.edu/scratchr2/static/pdfs/help/AnimateYourNameGuide.pdf
[Accessed Nov. 6th, 2017]