Teaching Java using Greenfoot to KS4: Week 7

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 24 October 2011

Week 7 - The joys of binary

This week was used to give pupils a breathing space in their computer lab lesson to complete their piano projects.

We used the theory lesson to introduce pupils to the joys of the binary counting system, which was fun. We looked at how denary works and then extended this to binary, doing lots of conversions between both systems. We defined LSB, MSB, bit, nibble and byte and made a few notes on what a character code was, a character set and ASCII. Pupils had to spell out their names in ASCII. We briefly touched on the hex numbering system.

Quite a few pupils were away on trips so I'll have to revisit this anyway but with the next lesson on strings and string manipulation, this seemed like the right time to introduce this topic. Fortunately, they are bright pupils, good at Maths, so we didn't need to labour all of this.

Half term next week so lots of time for preparing lessons (*£&$!). This was a fun site, for making ASCII art.