Computing Science Progression Pathway
Over the last three years I have been part of a small group of primary teachers who have created a Computing Science Progression Pathway document with exemplified learning examples from the beginning of Early Level to the End of Third Level. This has been an invaluable experience as we have explored the Computing Science Experiences and Outcomes and benchmarks in great detail and researched and created resources to support these. Computational thinking is at the core of these pathways.
From these Progression Pathways, myself and the rest of a bigger team, have gone on to create exemplified lesson slides and videos to support the teaching of Computing Science in Early Years establishments, primary schools and the first 3 years of secondary schools across the authority. I have tried to be innovative in my lesson planning and creating, to try and appeal to many, as well as getting the main point of the lessons across.
Here are highlights from some of my unplugged lessons:
Practitioner Enquiry
As part of a Digital Leadership course that I have taken part in, I piloted the Early Level progression planners in two P1 classes and assessed their knowledge and understanding of computational thinking skills. I shared the technical vocabulary of the computational thinking concepts and approaches but related them to their everyday lives, e.g. they follow algorithms everyday when they take part in routines such as washing their hands or reciting their times tables. Here is a brief overview of the lessons:
I encouraged the class teachers to continue to use the computational thinking concepts and approaches vocabulary in their daily teaching, as this gives the children a strong foundation of understanding to build their computational thinking skills on.
