Our Approach to the Computing Curriculum
The curriculum will be broad, balanced and integrated with the breadth and depth that will support students whichever pathway they choose at Key Stage 4 and beyond. We will provide students with an understanding of the foundations of computing, to help them better apply information technology and better understand the implications of the technologies they use.
Wherever possible we will teach computing without computers, but will use information technology to evidence and enhance learning. We will use computational thinking to develop confident, creative and resilient problem solvers. Teaching and learning will focus on solving (scalable) real-life problems, and we will ensure strong links to other curriculum subjects. We will use programming tools to bridge the gap between models (good computational thinking) and computers, selecting the appropriate programming language for the challenge and enabling us to teach key programming concepts rather than teaching programming languages for the sake of it.
Our Approach to Lessons
The primary goal of the Computing Department is to promote Computer Science (and computing in general) to young people as an interesting, engaging, and intellectually stimulating discipline. We want to capture the boy’s imagination and address common misconceptions about what it means to be a computer scientist.
The lesson approaches often tend to be kinaesthetic, focusing on the Enterprise skills of the school, involving teamwork, problem-solving and so on. The activities allow students to discover answers for themselves and help them to realize that they are capable of finding solutions to problems on their own, rather than being given the solution to apply to the problem. For example, students don’t really need to be able to convert numbers to binary, but it is valuable for them to discover the patterns such as the doubling value of bits, patterns when you count in binary, and how the range increases exponentially as you add bits.
