Programming and coding

The British National Curriculum has undergone a change and ICT has become Computing. Every keystage level, and every strand is jam packed with the words programming and computer science. The old curriculum only referred to control technology and floor robots. I've created a unit this half term on a programming with Year 6. There are a number of really good free iPad apps ideal for this. We started with BeeBots, spent one lesson working on an Hour of Code and in the last 2 weeks have been using HopScotch. Today's lesson was a real eye opener, all of us, me included, of sitting around like geeks programming. I set the first challenge, to make 3 differing sized squares with varying coloured lines and varying line thickness's. I was amazed that it was the girls who completed this challenge quickest. The final activity was for the students to begin using the sprites, the little animal,s to do multiple layered tasks. No easy feat I assure you. This is quite a difficult task as quite a lot of critical thinking is involved and each animal becomes a layer of code on its own. The creator uses:

• blocks of text
• repeats
• loops
• and sets perimeters.

Here is Diana's example. Diana's not a computerish person, but goodness me is she adapt at programming.

Now I wished I'd filmed Nicholas's He much have made about 500 varying squares, in varying positions all over the screen. next week is obiviously going to be exciting when we make our own game.