Computing Curriculum Purpose of study

  • A high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world.
  • The core of computing is computer science, in which pupils are taught the principles of information and computation, how digital systems work, and how to put this knowledge to use through programming.

So if understanding and using computational thinking is important I thought I would share some simple ways to cover this in your classroom.  Which for the first blog post is Abstraction.

What is it?

Through the process of abstraction, a programmer hides all but the relevant data about an object in order to reduce complexity and increase efficiency (Margaret Rouse, Tech Target, 2018).

How?

For Christmas I got a called Film in Five Seconds, the book is a bit like a quiz book where you have to try and guess the film from an icon set version of the film’s plot. Each film has had the key parts of the plot analysed and then been made into an eye-catching infographic, this was the idea behind design studio H-57, who are based in Milan (all rights reserved to Matteo Civaschi and Gianmarco Milesi, the book is available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Film-Five-Seconds-Great-Moments-ebook/dp/B00EDOBZI0)

Classroom

To replicate a version of this in the classroom I would recommend using the terrific app Adobe Spark Video or Microsoft PowerPoint. Here’s a full guide to using Adobe Spark Video here. When using Microsoft PowerPoint you can get icons by creating a google search for icon sets and whatever else you’re looking for and then edit them on PowerPoint (see blog post on creating infographics here). You could even further this by creating an icon story that could be turned into a full story.

Icon Story

Why?

This is a nice, simple activity to teach part of Computing Curriculum, children’s understanding of computational thinking and how I.T works is believed to be the most under taught part of the computing curriculum and this can be helped by enjoyable and engaging activities like this.

Thanks for Reading,

Adam

@_geekyteacher