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.

Monday 10 October 2011

Week 6 - Things just got harder, and easier ...

Most pupils are getting to the stage where they have finished their piano (chapter 5 of the Greenfoot book) and are playing with customising it (not very constructive in terms of the syllabus but fun anyway). I worked through Chapter 6 in the book again over the weekend and am struggling with this; there is a rather large jump in complexity in this chapter and I know my excellent pupils will struggle with the abstract ideas it contains, especially in dealing with lists and collections.

So, while I figure out how to deal with this, we are going to spend a month or so with BBCBASIC as well as introduce BlueJ for Java. Our syllabus requires us to look at a procedural language. The plan is to set them lots of small, focussed problems and get them expert in producing pseudo-code in constantly mixed-up groups. Then dry-run the pseudo-code, showing them how to do that and produce test plans. Then they will have to implement the code in BBCBASIC and finally, implement the code again, but this time in Java using BlueJ. Hopefully, looking at BBCBASIC as well as Java will drive home some of the more basic ideas: variables, constants, selection and iteration, arrays etc. This might make life a bit easier when we return to a world made up of objects and classes (or it might confuse them - we shall see). If nothing else, we can tick off lots of bulletpoints in the syllabus in the next four weeks and that can only be a good thing.

This week, the plan then is to get them all closer to having a finished fun piano, then start working through the tutorials in the BBCBASIC application. It has been donkey's years since I looked at BASIC, but it all came flooding back on Sunday.
Posted by at