Note: With the draft National Curriculum being issued in 2013, this repo is now obsolete. Please check out my KS3 Computing repo instead.
This repo is currently at a very early stage of development. It will contain lesson plans and resources that I am developing for my Key Stage 3 (ages 11 to 14 years) classes in a UK school.
Plans will be based around 1hr of ICT in years 7, 8 and 9 per week. I teach in a mixed comprehensive on the South Coast of England. We have about 1650 students on roll. The size of the classes range from around 30 students in Year 7 to about 20 students in years 8 and 9. We currently offer GCSE in Computing and iGCSE in Information Technology as options at Key Stage 4. The curriculum here is intended to provide progression onto either of these courses.
My classroom is usually organised with six project tables in the centre with four students to a table in years 8 and 9, and five to a table in year 7. I have 30 workstations around the outside of the room. Hence, the plans assume this class setup. Please fork and adapt for your needs.
Although the Programme of Study for ICT in England and Wales has been dis-applied from September 2012, I have decided to base this curriculum on the National Strategy's [Yearly Teaching Objectives for ICT] (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100612050234/nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/16101). I have done this for a number of reasons:
- they provide progression as students move through the Key Stage
- they afford a fairly broad mix of ICT and computer studies knowledge, skills and understanding. (In my view the previous National Curriculum orders did not lend themselves to a boring diet of MS Office application training: that was just how many schools chose to present it.)
- the Yearly Teaching Objectives are pitched so that, in theory, there should be some continuity with the skill being developed across other parts of the curriculum in England and Wales.
Having said the above, I have slimmed down a some of the objectives on 'Finding things out' and will place more emphasis on those that provide opportunities for developing computational thinking and programming (see note below). I will also be aiming to pitch the Year 9 work so that most students will have a chance of securely attaining level 7, this is higher than the original pitch of the teaching objectives in the Framework for Teaching ICT.
The aim will be to review and refine as I teach the units. Again, please fork the repository and adapt to your local needs. Pull requests for typos, broken links, factual errors or suggestions for improvement are welcome.
It is exciting to have a licence to spend more time on computing and computational thinking--at least until the UK Government decides on what it wishes to do with ICT and computing. With a view to programming (and yes, I know there is more to computation than programming!!), my intention is to provide progression in the form of [Scratch] (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and modelling in year 7, to [Alice] (http://www.alice.org) and [Python] (http://www.python.org/) (maybe [Ruby] (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en) but Python seems to be emerging as the favourite from colleagues I speak with) in year 8 and Java through [Greenfoot] (http://www.greenfoot.org/door) in year 9. There will also be opportunities for learning mark-up languages (HTML5 with CSS, others being considered: Latex anyone?).
My intention is that we develop an object orientated paradigm throughout, i.e. one of data encapsulation and the passing of messages amongst loosely coupled objects. I want the emphasis to be on the conceptual skills rather than a specific language. The same will hold true for development life-cycles, the precise type of which I am largely agnostic about from the perspective of teaching 11 to 14 year olds: I just want them to work through one so they can access levels 7 and 8 :-).
I am keeping a close eye on the [CAS] (http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/) scheme of work and will aim to include topics such as the fetch-execute cycle, logic gates, binary and other computing concepts at apprpriate points in the scheme. The inclusion of these topics will probably be more iterative as I work them through with my department.
Key Stage 3 ICT by Tim Eaglestone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/eaglestone/Key-Stage-3-ICT.