British Values Multimedia Competition Launched

Competition details

British Values Competition

Do you teach Y5 or Y6 IT / Computing in a school with a York postcode?

Following a discussion with the headteacher at Westfield Primary Community School and teachers at Manor CE Academy in York, we’re teaming up to offer a brand new competition for your students based on promoting British Values.

Your students could win a cash prize for creating a multimedia product (animation / video / game / presentation) about British Values: what they are, how they’re promoted in your school and how your school can promote them better. Your school can win the same amount to put the winning ideas into practice.

Find out more and register your school here

Viking Raider Debugging Challenge

Viking Raiders

Viking Raiders: Click to play

Y6s at Westfield are studying the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England in History and Geography so our latest project has been to work on a Viking Raiders game to show where the Vikings came from when they invaded.

Most of the project has been competitive challenges to encourage students to work together, support each other when they need help and to be resilient when they face problems.

At the end of the project though, I wanted students to have more of an open ended assessment challenge so I could see who’s understood each aspect and who needs more support.

Debugging Challenge Sheet for pupils

Debugging Challenge Sheet for pupils

Students started by typing in the following link: https://goo.gl/Bx3Cp4 which takes them to a Viking Raider Debugging Challenge sheet.

This gives them a link to a scratch game project that has been deliberately sabotaged so that they have to track down the bugs, fix them and improve the program.

To add an incentive to work quickly and collaboratively, students get points for their team for each challenge they complete.

Student evaluation sheet

Student evaluation sheet

After completing as many of the challenges as they can, students then fill in an evaluation & reflection sheet in their jotter to keep track of how much they’ve understood, how much they’ve enjoyed and what they (and I) can do to improve next time round.

Resources:

Staying Safe Online

Today was my first Y6 Computing lesson at Westfield Primary Community School. A puncture on my bike meant I hitched a lift with my head teacher from Manor and three teachers visiting from Japan which was fascinating (and a little surreal!)

Today’s lesson was all about how to stay safe online. The Internet’s a fabulous tool but there are real dangers that we have to be aware of so that we know how to avoid them.

We watched the CEOP video about how much more serious people are about their safety in real life compared to when online:

Create a digital story in scratch with top tips on how to stay safe online

Create a digital story in scratch with top tips on how to stay safe online

Next, we came up with a list of top tips for things we should never do and things we should always do if we want to stay safe online and worked in pairs to put these into an interactive digital story using scratch.

Thanks to Westfield staff and students for making me so welcome. And thanks Brian for the lift!

Next week we’re creating a Viking Raider game to fit in with history and geography.

Lesson Objectives:

  1. To understand the schools e-safety policy: appropriate to their age
  2. Children select appropriate tools to collaborate and communicate politely, confidently and safely with others within and beyond their school.
  3. To integrate words, images and sounds imaginatively into a presentation for different audiences and purposes

Resources:

Promote Success, Celebrate Failure

One more student than computers available

One more student than computers available

Tomorrow, for the first time, I’ll be teaching one more student in my Computing room than the number of computers available. Admittedly, I’m spoilt not to have encountered this problem before – with 27 computers in my room it’s amazing to have had such small classes up until now.

What should I do with the extra student? Should I make a rota for students to take turns sharing? Should I strategically partner up the least able with the most able? Should I scavenge another computer from a different room or kick up a fuss for the school to invest in more kit?

One thing I really want to make a priority at the start of this new academic year is not only promoting success by praising progress but also to celebrate failure. That might sound a little counter productive, but in order for students to consistently show the sort of resilience they need to enjoy programming (or any other type of challenge they’ll face in life), they need to accept and embrace their mistakes and failures as learning opportunities. Sometimes I think I’m guilty of investing so much time into resources and activities designed to avoid mistakes that students commonly make that when they do inevitably mess up a piece of work they haven’t got the confidence and skills to lift themselves up and move on in the right direction.

promoceleb

Promote Success, Celebrate Failure

So, this year, I’m going to try out using my bonus student as a “Promo Celeb”. Their job (rotated each lesson…) will be:

  • Promote Success: Walk around the classroom taking photos of the best work that they see. At the end of the lesson they email me the best one and delete the rest. These can be used to promote the work that the class has done via the school digital signage and twitter feed.
  • Celebrate Failure: Look out for people who’ve made mistakes or hit a brick wall in their work. Ask them questions to help them find their own way to solve their problem. At the end of the lesson they should tell me the names of people who showed the most resilience and they’ll get a merit. There’s a good chance they’ll get a merit for themselves too if they explain their choices clearly rather than picking their friends.

It might work, or it could be a disaster. If it is, someone can tell me it’s a learning opportunity!

Download the PromoCeleb Student instructions

Python Touch

Write, run and debug python code in a browser

Computing students at Manor learn how to write and debug code using the python programming language. I wanted them to have a tool that would let them play around in python using their iPads similar to the brilliant trinket.io tool which lets you write and run code in a web browser but – to help with debugging – I really wanted students to be able run their code one line at a time as well as all at once.

Python touch is a quick and dirty web app which allows you to:

  • Write / edit python code
  • Shows line numbers
  • Use syntax highlighting (pretty colours)
  • Run python code on any web capable device
  • Debug python code one line at a time

Because iPads don’t let you save files other than images / videos I thought it could also be fun to add a steganography feature which lets you save python code hidden inside an image file or load python code that has been hidden inside an image file. This is just a bit of fun but can lead to interesting class discussions about encryption and encoding messages to keep data safe or hidden.

You can try out Python Touch here or view / download the source code here if you’re interested in extending or improving it.

CPU Battle Tanks

CPU Battle Tanks

Learn to write low level assembler code that will move and shoot a tank

My brighter students often ask “How does the CPU inside a computer actually work?”. They don’t actually need to fully understand the Fetch-Execute-Cycle of how instructions are followed for the GCSE in Computer Science that we do but if they’re to have any understanding of how to get the most performance out of the processors when writing code, I think it’s a really important conceptual building block for them to get their heads around.

I made this CPU Battle Tank simulator for them to see how instructions can be stored in memory and then ‘run’ one by one. It’s based on a simplified version of a CPU (Little Man Computer) which works in the same way as the ‘brains’ inside most modern computers/tablets/phones but with a simplified set of instructions that allows you to move, aim and shoot a tank by writing low level assembly code.

There’s a youtube video that explains the concepts behind it and how to get started here.

You can download the source and tweak / extend it here to add your own levels.

Hello world!

blog

Time to finally build a blog…

Starting a blog has been on my todo list for far too long… I’ve always resisted it up until now as I doubted anyone would be interested in my inane thoughts and comments…

I hope that this blog will eventually be a way of linking to different teaching resources I’ve shared on the web. If you have any comments on how I could improve it, do let me know and I’ll dutifully ignore them!