The title sounds like a nasty affliction – but I actually want to describe a great lesson! I was looking for a nice challenge for my Year 9 Computing class to continue developing their understanding of variables, if statements and loops – ideally moving on to nested statements and loops. As ever Twitter came to…
I have the pleasure of teaching two great Year 9 classes this year. One is a fabulous Maths group that I have taught for the past two years, another is an ICT taster class (we have brought taster options into Year 9 this year, allowing students to get a taster of KS4 courses – this…
I attended Alan O’Donohoe’s excellent Hack To The Future event at Our Lady’s High School in Preston on Saturday with 13 of our students, many of whom are on our GCSE Computing course. There were many highlights, in particular I should mention Freaky Clown and his tales of a hacker turned good. I won’t repeat…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock today I’m assuming you’ll have seen some excitable headlines followed by a more detailed speech about the future of technology in education in the UK and in particular the future of the subject of ICT. In a nutshell Mr Gove has scrapped the ICT curriculum, whilst keeping ICT…
With todays announcement from Mr Gove it seems a good point to reflect on my first steps on a year long coding journey. I spent my Tuesday evening completing the first week of lessons on the brilliant CodeYear. It took me about an hour and a half and was a great little introduction to Javascript….
Learn To Code Code Academy have set up Code Year. A lesson a week that over the course of the year will teach you how to code. Slate suggest each lesson will run to about 5 hours. Which is a hefty commitment. But I’ve signed up and will be encouraging learners at school to do…
Rasberry Pi gets one step closer! See here and here why it’s exciting.
The BBC along with Keri Facer at Manchester Metropolitan University are investigating the idea of a BBC Micro Mk2.0. For those of you who didn’t grow up in 80’s Britain, the BBC Micro was an Acorn computer, build for the BBC Computer Literacy Project and became the mainstay of early IT in almost every British school. An…
Arrington invests in Code Academy I spotted the excellent Code Academy a few weeks ago. And it looks like I wasn’t alone. It’s received a huge round of funding including from Michael Arrington: What really excites me about Codecademy is that you can learn almost anything this way. All I can think of is how…
Programming Principles I like these analogies and principles for programming basics, nice talking points for teachers using Code Academy as a starting point for teaching programming.