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 30 September 2011

Week 4 - Variables

Another week has gone and time is flying. One class had a Thinking Skills day so missed their time in the computer suite. They should have caught up by next week.

I'm still happy with the progress pupils are making. They were getting their heads around variables this week, and the idea of storing instances of a helper class in a variable. We did some examples of declaring variables and constants and initialisation. We also talked about meaningful names and reserved words in the theory lesson. They are pretty good at doing what is required in the book but still need much more practice in explaining what they are doing using the correct jargon and using examples. I need to work on this!

Before pupils progress onwards to making a playable piano application, I have set them all a challenge: to improve their Crab game in some way or ways. I'll probably give them a few weeks for this as I am keen for them to start doing their own research into how to do things - they have to start somewhere! This is going to require them to find out how to do something on their own, by using the Greenfoot site and having a look at some games others have written and by doing a bit of research on the internet.

I don't think I could want for two better classes of students! Apart from all being nice people, they are so enthusiastic and hard-working. This is helped by the excellent OCR AS Computing course. It doesn't get any better than this course in my opinion, although I did note this week, AQA are developing a GCSE in Programming or some such title. I filled out a question for them and was a) excited to see OO rather than procedural languages being a main area of study and b) dismayed to see the same old boring topics (databases, systems life cycle etc) in there. I hope they don't make a mess of a potentially great course but I don't think this course will be for us - not unless they get rid of the coursework side of things completely. It's not too late to sort it out, AQA!!

Some decisions need to be made with regard to the GCSE ICT course soon. We switched from the OCR to the AQA course recently, which was long overdue, but these controlled assessments are messy to run (and I suspect the same for all exam boards). There's always a few pupils who are off school or doing something else that takes them outside of lessons and trying to keep everyone on track is interesting! I have also already come across being told one thing in an AQA meeting only to find out that actually, they meant the opposite. I'm not a fan of controlled assessments. They are very boring to prepare students for e.g. databases and then getting them to spend their time doing a similar database task. GCSE ICT is not part of my idea of a rounded education. I think we might have to bite the bullet and not offer ICT anymore soon, only Computing - a risky way forward but it must be the best way, surely? 

I have my departmental budget now so spent this afternoon getting a list of programming books in Java together for the school library and have an order ready for a couple of Kinects for the pupils to start using in their programs. The pupils are looking forward to this.

I'm looking forward to next week. If only all courses were like this one!
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