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.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Week 5 - Constructors

Generally, a good lesson in the computer suite today. Pupils have started Chapter 5 of the Greenfoot textbook and loved the idea of a piano that can play animal sounds so they all worked very hard on their pianos. We had some fun, with the students coming up and playing the piano on the interactive whiteboard as well, which was amusing.

A few got near the end of their piano, although when they looked at the final version of the piano code in the book-scenarios, they wondered where the FOR loop had come from. Chapter 5 uses a WHILE loop! It was really pleasing to see the first few girls really start to independently hunt for bugs in their code and work together to track down where something has gone wrong. I have got to keep praising this, and fortunately, found a big pile of reward stickers in the bottom of one of my drawers today so will have a praise frenzy in the next lesson.

The introduction of constructors, where you pass parameters when you create a new object, is causing a few problems for some students and they struggled to get to grips with this idea. I guess this must be quite a difficult idea and I don't think I explained it that well so will do a lesson on constructors in the next theory lesson on Friday. I'll also have to go through arrays as well, as I think that students are copying but not really understanding.

I keep promising both classes a test soon. I must get my act together so will put something together for next week.
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