Global Carbon Cycle Model

Mango Learning

We are a community of teachers that have developed extensive computing resources primarily aimed at the English secondary school curriculum that can be accessed here: www.mangolearning.academy . Mango learning empowers teachers to deliver great lessons that explain complex ideas using clear and highly scaffolded teaching and learning resources. We are very excited to offer these resources for free to the community. These teaching and learning resources for computing are made by teachers for teachers and we understand the day-to-day challenges that teacher face. The resources incorporate general and computing specific evidence-based pedagogy. We incorporated spaced retrieval practice though knowledge organisers, diagnostic questions and quizzes, for instance. We also incorporate ideas from cognitive load theory through lots of worked examples. To help with coding we use PRIMM and block to text based pedagogical approaches. To support literacy we address ...

Block to Text Programming

When we move students on from block to text programming, we want to transfer the learning that they have made on block coding into text programming. When we are transferring learning we want to transfer knowledge from one context into another. In moving from one context to another we need to think in an analogical manner such that when we know how to solve a problem in one domain we can use it to help us solve a problem in another domain. The use of analogous examples helps learners see the deeper structure. We do this by seeking out deep structures and remove the surface structure of a problem. This approach is called expansive framing and we have expectation of future use in a different context. In contrast, bounded framing does not have utility beyond the current learning. Current learning needs to make connections to earlier contexts from which learners are expected to transfer in knowledge to the new context. Transfer of learning does not happen by itself; the teacher ...

How to support your students to write code

For many children writing code can be a daunting prospect. To help children learn to write code more easily we can use a range of scaffolded pedagogies. Initially these approaches take ownership of the code away from the students thereby giving them confidence to explore and experiment with the code. Gradually as the students learn more and more we can reduce the amount of support until they are able to write their own programs independently. In a previous article we looked at approaches for supporting pupils to learn to read code that included activities such as explaining, predicting and tracing code, and live demonstrations with worked examples. This follow up article presents some approaches to support pupils with writing code. Fixing broken code Children can find and fix common syntax, runtime and logical errors in a piece of code. Errors might include missing brackets, missing speech marks, spelling mistakes and missing variables declarations, for instance. Th...

Teach Computer Science

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