If you went to school around the same time as me, you may have been lucky enough to play, I mean learn, with the amazing bigtrak robot. I can clearly remember this trundling across the carpet as we used its control panel to issue instructions. Happy days. It’s fantastic that students nowadays are doing so much coding. Free programs like Scratch make it so easy for children to learn core concepts, such as selection, repetition and the use of variables, but if we don’t also provide opportunities for students to work with external hardware, they’re missing out. Whilst BeeB... (Read More)

Last term I was teaching my class to use some of the drawing features of Scratch so they could design, build and test their own drawing application. This was a really interesting unit to work on, as it was one of the first that didn't have a game as an outcome, but an application. We chose to have a clear audience for our work, building our programs with year 3 children in mind. Having taught the key skills of using pens and integrating buttons in Scratch, we moved away from the computer suite and turned our attention to usability; the measure of how easy an application is to u... (Read More)

This Saturday we joined thousands of other coders around the world as we hosted our first ever World Scratch Day 2015 event in Canterbury. It was an excellent day which saw over 35 children and adults working together to solve problems, debug and collaborate. We kick started the day with a robotics enabled registration system, of course built in Scratch and with Lego Wedo equipment, where the attendees had to wave their hand in front of a sensor before entering their name. Names were then picked at random by the program, giving everyone a chance to introduce themselves to the group. We h... (Read More)

As a year 6 teacher and ICT Subject Leader, I am all too aware of how the term 'ICT' has become muddled over the years. Some use it to refer to an extension of a lesson: 'Let's type our stories up in ICT'. Others use it to refer to equipment: 'How are you using ICT in your lesson?'. Some use it to refer to an explicit subject: 'This afternoon we're doing ICT'. However, even as an isolated subject, the muddying of the term has resulted in less and less explicit teaching of computing skills. By replacing ICT with Computing, a clear message is be... (Read More)

This week I've been working on resources for www.studyzone.tv for the programming aspect of the new computing curriculum. It's been great fun and has really taken me back to my degree in computing. I've found it especially interesting to see that many of the terms and concepts I will be teaching my class in September are the same terms and concepts I was being taught at university. As part of my work this week, I couldn't resist building a version of Flappy Bird in the excellent Scratch software that many schools up and down the country will be using. The game is fully comm... (Read More)