Assessing the New Computing Curriculum

After four days at the Bettt Show speaking to teachers about the new Computing curriculum, I was asked over and over again how I would teach it and how I would assess it. This document released by the DfE this week, doesn't really shine much light on the situation.

I was lucky enough to take part in a meeting with the "NOT the DfE Expert Computing Group" during Bett, where this topic was hot conversation. I'm still not sure we resolved anything, but it got me thinking seriously about how I would assess my students without levels and how I would explain this to SLT.

Pointless Data?

I have always argued that levels were pointless since before I trained to be a teacher. They do not mean anything to students or parents. They are just numbers, and yet at a data driven school, teachers are expected to give a level to students progress as much as 4 times every academic year. I think I'd approach SLT and start a conversation about dropping this system from Sept 2014, or considering a new system. Without actually having this conversation with someone in SLT it's difficult to say the outcome, but I would urge you to start pestering them, perhaps with a system like mine (below).

What would I do?

If I were still teaching (I still think I am tbh, only been out of the classroom for 3 weeks!) I think this is how I would go about assessing the new computing curriculum:

All students at KS3 have an eportfolio, either a website or a blog. Over the course of Year 7, 8 and 9 this would stay with each student. It would act as an exercise book for the subject, where students would add all their work in the form of links, screen grabs, videos, screen casts, audio files, whatever.

I'd create a badge for each bullet point on the new programme of study for KS3. Each of these would have a subsection of badges that were gold, silver and bronze. (For your school data this could be lower, middle, high).

I'd make new badges in this style reflecting new curric

(algorithms, programming, data representation, hardware, networks, etc)

At the end of each unit I would assess the students classwork, tests, homework against the unit's objectives, and the CAS Pupil Progress Chart produced by Mark Dorling. (Row purple would be bronze, row red would be silver and row black would be gold.) Then I would award a badge to the student based on the teacher assessment against the statements in the chart. I'd be looking for accuracy and frequency as an assessor within each unit.

Students would then be able to add their badge to their eportolios next to their work. They would understand where they would need to go next to progress looking at the overall chart.  At the end of KS3 students would then have an eportfolio full of work and badges that show how they have progressed through the computing curriculum.

Obviously this is just a theory, I'm not in a position to test it, but it could be a starting point.

I wrote a book!

This year I've not only been speaking at events, attending meetings on the new curriculum, working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to create a scheme of work, creating videos for @GeekGurlDiaries, helping to run CAS #include, and my doing my day job - teaching, I've also written a book!

Adventures In Raspberry Pi is a tech book designed for teenagers new to Raspberry Pi, Linux, programming and electronics. It is a full colour guide to get youngsters started in a creative and fun way.

That was the idea anyway! I felt that may of the books and tutorials available for the Pi assumed some prior knowledge, and were hindering getting young people started or keeping them enthused. I hoped that my book would go back to basics and point young people and novices in the right direction.

It is due for release on 22nd November 2013, just in time for Christmas! You can get a copy from amazon both in the UK and US.

Adventures include:

• Getting set up and started with hardware & software
• Using Linux (both command line and GUI)
• Programming in Scratch
• Creating graphics with turtle
• Programming in Python
• Programming Minecraft Pi
• Creating music with Sonic Pi
• Using GPIO and basic electronics
• A final big project
• Where to go to learn more

Hope you enjoy it.

I need your votes!

For the second year in a row, my ongoing mission/project code named 'Geek Gurl Diaries' has been nominated and short listed as a regional finalist for a Talk Talk Digital Heroes Award in the London region. Last year I narrowly missed out on winning to a much better project 'Code Club' :) 

I'd really appreciate your support in helping me to win my category by clicking on this link, then 'Voting Gallery' selecting 'London' from the map and then scrolling to the bottom and clicking 'Vote here' under my name and description. And here is why I need your support: 

I look about twitter and the interwebs and sometimes, rather negatively feel that some charitable enterprises get a lot of media attention and funding. Some are even selling a product which in turn helps fund their missions. My project gets neither funding or media attention.

As a full time teacher I work from 7.30am till 5pm daily, sometimes without a lunch. I'm passionate about changing the way young people are taught Computing and ICT, so I spend what spare time I have left over working on this, which means when I get home I work till 10pm. In my "holidays" I work. This summer I've been assisting at hack events for children all over the country. Making good content for youtube is part of that time, I can tell you, it takes ages to produce just one video for my GGD channel. 

I'm not alone in this, many of the working members of CAS and CAS #include are the same, giving so much to the cause and asking for nothing but a little moral support in return. Teachers get a bad press, but we're all right really! 

To be recognised for my work in this way would be a real achievement. I find myself battling everyday with people who make claims in the media and online about why there are not enough girls in computing. People who are heralded as experts, when in fact that do not have the first clue about education, or even teenage girls. I receive emails and comments from teenagers via my youtube channel and blog daily, asking really great questions, and for more content. Proof that in fact they do enjoy computing. 

Please vote, every day and on every device you own, share this plea with your networks and maybe we can do something positive about changing computing and ict education to include all.

PyConUK and PythonEDU

I attended my first Python conference over the weekend of the 29th September. This is primarily a conference for programmers using the programming language Python, but this year the organisers have worked to include the teaching community as programming becomes more and more likely to appear on any plans for a new ICT curriculum in the UK.

I was not sure what to expect over the weekend, and as I took my seat and the mornings introduction began I realised that the geek to teacher ratio was worse than expected. I was constantly asked over the weekend if I thought that teacher groups knew about professional developer communities like the Python community? I guess not.

My first session was an introduction to Python for newbies. This was my first ever programming lesson, and as a teacher I constantly questioned how I would teach this to my students? Would I teach concepts and basic coding steps and then ask students to implement them in made up circumstances or would I flip this model and give students code through a project so they can understand its application before working out what the code is doing to understand how to program. (I'm not sure if I'm closer to a solution to this conundrum.) Python seems extremely easy to learn as a programming language. I come from a more scripting background so it is still difficult for me to completely understand it but I feel empowered to at least have a go. The best part of this session was that the organisers had placed experienced developers around the room to help us students when we got stuck. This was genius. I was lucky enough to have been sat with someone who explained problems to me in such a way that helped me to understand. This triggered an idea - why not ask the coders to produce screencasts, voice threads or videos for simple concept explanations or activities to aid learning. they could be uploaded *somewhere* and we teachers could use them to create lessons.

Later that evening there was a discussion between the chairman of the Python Software Foundation, Van Lindberg, the staff of PyConUK, and for some strange reason I was there too. We discussed the future of Python in education globally. I enjoyed this discussion as I think we are all working towards the same goal. I really think the python community has an opportunity here to have Python as the language taught predominantly in schools in the UK. The raspberry pi is going to make this the number one language and if there is a way to teach something in scratch and then mirror it in python to show kids the advantages and disadvantages of both it will be an even better education tool. 

On the second day I worked with Nicholas Tollervey @ntoll to deliver an 'Education Sprint'. After talking with many of the teachers on the first day it became clear that both parties needed to be brought together to tackle the problems faced by educators. The simplest way to do this was to start with statements or questions. We had the following:

• What do the developers need to know from the teachers?
• What do developers think students should learn?
• What do developers think teachers need to know to be able to teach programming?
• What ideas for projects that can turned into schemes of work can you think of?
• Willing to help teachers?

After giving the attendee's time to write answers for each we started a very interesting discussion on each topic. By the end of the discussion we chose 5 project ideas and split into groups. One teacher per group of developers to guide the discussion to create a scheme of work or series of lessons. I think this was a really great process, I think it showed that both groups could collaborate well to come up with something fantastic, and I personally think that's what education is all about. Good things happen when you bring experts and educators together. All the projects have been put onto GitHub which can be found on Nicholas' blog.

Somehow I ended up on a panel where I clearly didn't belong, but y'know need to represent! Luckily I was rescued before I really said what I think about the ongoing issues of education. lol.

I kept returning to the idea of having an online space where teachers, developers and students could access what they need from each other. I'm not really sure how to describe what I'm envisioning:

As the three target groups want different things it might be an idea to split the site into 3 categories: If you are a teacher click here, if you are a student click here, if you are a python guru genius developer wishing to help the first two groups because you are lovely click here.

• Geeks can upload videos/screenshares/audio/voicethreads, or activities, or problems. They could locate schools via a search nearby asking for support, or advertise code dojos.
• Teachers can use geek content to create lessons, we can share lesson plans, activities and schemes of work. Or search for geeks in the area willing to help out at different levels (1st, 2nd, 3rd line etc)
• Students can find help to questions from geeks, or find other students to help them, find events to attend for them.

It's something I would like to work on, but I think I just have too much going on right now, especially if we are expecting an ofsted inspection at any moment. Perhaps some nice developer will help me out. *hint hint major hint*

At the end of the day I gave a lightening talk about trying to get the Python developer community to get involved by creating content that could be blended or flipped by teachers into lesson plans. It's difficult to get across what you are trying to under a time pressure. I tried to use my example of teaching to explain the need for a Python EDU portal but not sure I really did it very well. (you can judge by watching this video from 1.50.53 onwards) I'm trying to promote a way of doing things in teaching, not myself. The feedback from the community is that they wanted an inclusive community/group/mailing list/forum for teachers and geeks. Github is too geeky for teachers and CAS is too teachery for geeks (not my words).

The beauty of reaching out to this community of programmers is that they work on a open source principle that mirrors my own teaching. The python community listened to what I had to say and in many ways have responded. This has culminated in the creation of a google group called Python EDU for geeks and educators. I hope in some way teachers will see this as an opportunity to do something great. But currently, with this strange education climate this all could be a waste of time :/

P.S. Maybe the site should include a geek to teacher speak and vice versa translator for the lols.