Introduction

We now offer OCR AS Computing to our KS4 pupils as an alternative to the GCSE ICT course. Pupils will study this course over two years; it is normally done in one year by 16-17 year olds but given the excellent students we have here, I think they will cope. Just under 50% of the pupils opted to do this course when they had to make their choices at the end of Year 9. There is no coursework in the OCR AS computing course (which ironically means we will be able to do more practical work as we won't have to jump through hoops).

The pupils are all girls in a high-performing grammar school. They have all had some experience writing code in previous years; they have used Scratch to write a shoot-em game, VB.net to produce a web browser, Logicator for flow charts and html to produce web sites. Pupils on this Computing course will have three 50 minute lessons a week in both year 10 and 11; one lesson is intended to be a pure theory lesson and they will also have a double lesson lasting 1 hour 40 minutes in a computer suite. I expect them to do about an hour or so a week of homework. Pupils will primarily be learning Java. The main IDE we will be using is Greenfoot (excellent and free). We will be working from the Michael Kolling Greenfoot textbook and using resources from the Greenfoot website. We may dabble with other languages and IDEs.

The broad plan for the first year is to program program program by teaching pupils how to write computer games. I intend covering as much of the Greenfoot textbook as possible and as much of the Programming unit (OCR Syllabus F452) in year 1, and then the theory parts (F451) in year 2. By the end of the first year, I want the pupils to be able to confidently write their own computer games.

Friday 16 September 2011

Week 2 - So far so good ...

Both the classes had a single lesson today, where we practised working out whether quite complex expressions using relational and Boolean operators were true or false. They were also introduced to the idea of programming constructions, and we wrote our first pseudo-code using an IF statement.

All the pupils seem to have really thrown themselves into programming in the first two weeks. If I'm honest, I am quite surprised how easily many of them have got hold of some quite abstract ideas and then applied them in actual programs. There has been a lot of fun had so far and although I'm slightly on the control-freakery side, I'm fairly happy that a lot of constructive work has taken place and the laughing is a by-product of that - I hope I'm right and need to work out how to prove it is! Their homework is to get to page 30 in the Greenfoot book by the start of next week - probably an hour or so's work for most of them over the weekend.

Someone at our school has managed to arrange for a speaker to come in from Warwick University and talk about computers and artifical intelligence in a couple of weeks, so that is something for our students to look forward to.

Note to self: I must start looking for interesting trips we can do. And also programming competitions for students. I asked the students if they had any ideas and most said "ice skating". Mmmm. I'm not sure they all have the right idea, yet.

So all in all, I've gone home pretty happy and am ready to plan next week's work over the weekend.
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