Computing at St Matthias
At St Matthias, we teach children how to use the internet and technology safely, responsibly and confidently. As technology is constantly changing, we aim to give pupils the skills they need to adapt and make informed choices both in school and beyond.
We prepare children for life outside the classroom by helping them understand the exciting opportunities the internet offers, alongside the challenges and risks they may encounter. Online safety is an important part of our curriculum, and pupils are taught how to stay safe, respectful and confident when using technology.
We use the National Centre for Computing Education’s – Teach Curriculum to teach computing. This develops children’s skills across three key areas: information technology, digital literacy and computer science. Through this, pupils learn how technology works, how to use it effectively, and how to become confident, capable and responsible digital citizens.
You can find an overview of the skills that are taught:
Another aspect of computing that we want to develop in our students is the ability to use different hardware and software to create digital content. We do this through teaching the children how to use a range of targeted software and applications, across the curriculum. This might mean that children publish their writing using Puppet Pals, Google Slides or Google Docs. It may be that they use Explain Everything to articulate their thinking process when completing an activity in Maths or Science. It could be that they create videos or books to demonstrate something they have learned in RE. Finally, it may be that children create codes to manipulate sprites in Scratch Coding and learn how to debug programmes when there are problems.
Computational Thinking
Part of what we teach our St Matthias children is how to think computationally, which helps with their problem solving. This doesn’t require any technology but definitely helps when using technology, especially with coding.
Computers can be used to help us solve problems. However, before a problem can be tackled, the problem itself and the ways in which it could be solved need to be understood. Computational thinking allows us to do this. It allows us to take a complex problem, understand what the problem is and develop possible solutions. We can then present these solutions in a way that a computer, a human, or both, can understand. There are four key techniques (cornerstones) to computational thinking:
- decomposition – breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller, more manageable parts
- pattern recognition – looking for similarities among and within problems
- abstraction – focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant detail
- algorithms – developing a step-by-step solution to the problem, or the rules to follow to solve the problem
Each cornerstone is as important as the others. They are like legs on a table – if one leg is missing, the table will probably collapse. Correctly applying all four techniques will help when programming a computer.
A complex problem is one that, at first glance, we don’t know how to solve easily. Computational thinking involves taking that complex problem and breaking it down into a series of small, more manageable problems (decomposition). Each of these smaller problems can then be looked at individually, considering how similar problems have been solved previously (pattern recognition) and focusing only on the important details, while ignoring irrelevant information (abstraction). Next, simple steps or rules to solve each of the smaller problems can be designed (algorithms). Finally, these simple steps or rules are used to program a computer to help solve the complex problem in the best way.
Thinking computationally is not programming. It is not even thinking like a computer, as computers do not, and cannot, think. Simply put, programming tells a computer what to do and how to do it. Computational thinking enables you to work out exactly what to tell the computer to do.
If you would like to try out some unplugged activities (ones that don’t require technology), have a go at these.
Online Safety
Part of our computing curriculum is to make children aware of how to stay safe online. This may be teaching them how to assess whether a website is reliable but it could also be about knowing about potential risk and how to protect their details. We want our children to understand the impact of their digital footprints. Not only do we cover these things in our computing lessons, based around the Education for a Connected World framework but also in our PSHE lessons. Parent workshops also take place to equip parents with how to best support their children too. If you want to know more about keeping our children safe online, you can read more on the NSPCC website and can see here.