Teach Computer Science

Metacognition and computational thinking   Children do not easily see connections between the school subjects that they learn. Nearly everything can been viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective but in secondary schools knowledge is organised and delivered and partitioned into the subjects that we are familiar with: “Maths teachers teach maths, English teachers teach English, science teachers teach science and never the twain shall meet 1 . When complex knowledge and understanding is partitioned neatly into silos like this, it is little wonder that children cannot relate learning from one subject to another. Of course, knowledge and understanding are highly interrelated and getting children to see these complex connections will enrich their learning experience. Metacognitive strategies that can be applied across the curriculum can help to break some of these artificial barriers that children see between subjects. Metacognition is concerned with “learning about learning”. ...

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...

Before students can write code, they need to be able to read code. Computer science pedagogy is often based around the ideas of Piaget’s constructivism - where pupils develop their knowledge through exploration, and Papert’s constructionism - where pupils learn through creating artifacts. However, evidence has shown that learners need guidance to gain useful knowledge efficiently and to organise that knowledge in a clear and logical way. They need to be able to break a problem down, remove the unnecessary detail, find patterns and think algorithmically before they can start to write programs for solving problems. Just as we wouldn’t expect a young child to write prose before they can read, we need to provide guided approaches that use direct instruction and scaffolding to help our students read code before they can be expected to write code themselves. These guided approaches are needed just as much as, if not more than, creative discovery activities. Explain the code My first approach...

Knowledge organisers are increasingly being used to support a knowledge rich curriculum in English primary and secondary schools. The knowledge requirements alone for GCSE and A level is challenging even before coming onto higher order levels of understanding and analysis on the Bloom's taxonomy. Knowledge organisers. Knowledge organisers help to support pupils in retaining and retrieving key information and help with long term retrieval through self-testing and low stakes testing in class. In themselves they are nothing fancy. Typically, they are a single page that contains key information about a topic. They contain keywords and definitions, key facts, bullet points, labelled diagrams and other essential knowledge. They do not have extended prose and no procedural knowledge and are designed in such a way that allow for self-testing. Creating a knowledge organiser is one thing but it is how they are used is what makes them so powerful. I give out the knowledge organisers near the ...