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 7 October 2011

Week 5 - Jargon

That was a good task to do! I gave pupils a page of code and a list of buzzwords. They were mixed up into threes, working with people they don't sit next to and then they had to work together to identify the buzzwords in the code, colouring them in and then writing next to them what it was. It was a really good opportunity for them all to make some notes in a slightly different way on all of the jargon that they keep meeting. Method signatures and programming constructions needed to be explained but apart from that, there was some really good conversations going on. They are brighter than the sun, these pupils! This took about half an hour. The lesson used is available from the Downloads section.

None of them knew what MOD did so I set the groups a challenge, giving them e.g. 10 MOD 3 = 1 on the board and then giving them a few minutes to tell me what MOD did. Then I gave them 20 MOD 6 = 2 and a few more minutes. Then 7 MOD 4 = 3 and so on. One group got it after 4 sums were on the board and then a few more got it after a few more sums were put up. That was a fun challenge for them.There two competitions now that I will be entering them for this year: this one and this one. With pupils like these, how can they fail.
I have set up an anonymous questionnaire in Moodle for all the pupils to do next week, asking them all about how they feel the course is going, if they are happy, if they feel the teaching is okay, if they think the pace is okay etc. This should be interesting. I also have set the date for the test I've kept promising them for next Friday so that will give them a focus for revision of work they have done. On top of that, they have been asked to download BBC BASIC at home and do a few of the starter chapters.

I want us to play around with BASIC and also PASCAL for a bit, but fully intend to keep the momentum up with Java, as most seem to be really enthusiastically enjoying what they are doing. BBC BASIC looks simple enough for them to work through on their own, with just a bit of help in class from time to time.he next two weeks will be devoted to finishing the piano in chapter 5 and then customing it with their own sounds. I also want to do a few formal exercises on writing simple pseudocode to describe problems and then converting that into solutions in Java. Fortunately, I got my budget recently and ordered half a dozen reference books for Java, so should be able to get lots of ideas.
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