Year round, pupils have IT lessons that develop their coding skills and computational thinking.
During Computer Science Ed Week, Year 4 were making individual, funky tunes using coding and used coding to help a Pirate Captain find his treasure as part of their investigation into the use of programming to solve problems.
Our primary focus, when teaching the pupils about coding, is to teach the children computational thinking skills. Through this approach they learn a variety of programming languages during their time at Westbourne House. In this lesson, the pupils were using code.org, which introduces pupils to JavaScript, a popular text-based scripting language commonly used for web development and gaming. Code.org’s block-based interface makes it easier for our pupils to grasp concepts without getting bogged down in complex syntax.
As the children become more comfortable with coding and computational thinking, they are encouraged to think outside of the box and try things. Gradually we introduce pupils to text-based languages like JavaScript and Python. By the end of Year 8, pupils will use Python to programme our robots in Robotics.
Mr Gago, IT Teacher, said: “I like to ask the children: ‘If that works, what else can you try?’ I am encouraging them to be curious in their approach and experimental. That’s how you learn best. It’s a gradual progression and I love helping the younger children take their first coding steps, and stretching Year 8 at the end of the year with Python.”
