I’m just back from the Computing At School annual teachers’ conference,\r\nwhich was held in Birmingham University. It was a really fascinating\r\nconference – a mixture of policy, curriculum, practical advice, tips and\r\ntricks. The problem of computing in schools is now well known, with reports\r\nfrom the Royal Society, BCS, NESTA, and many other major organisations all\r\nsinging the same song: we’re raising a generation of people who know how to\r\nconsume computing technology, but not how to create it. <\/p>\r\n\r\n
CAS as a group have produced some very important contributions to this\r\npolicy debate – in terms of the current state of computing education, feedback\r\ninto national curriculum consultations, and a document outlining what a\r\ncomputing<\/i> curriculum would look like (rather than an ICT curriculum).\r\nSimon Peyton Jones of Microsoft gave one of the keynotes, on the curriculum for\r\ncomputing, and it’s very interesting stuff. How can we define a curriculum\r\nthat’s core, for a field that’s changing so quickly? Well, not all of it\r\nchanges…<\/p> \r\n\r\n
I attended a couple of workshops on various tools for teaching computing in\r\nschools, both of which were fascinating. Karen Brennan<\/a> of\r\nMIT Media lab gave a keynote and a workshop on Scratch<\/a>, which is an environment for teaching\r\nprogramming using movable blocks. It reminds me a bit of LOGO (which I used in\r\nprimary school myself in the ’80s!), but given that LOGO was invented by\r\nKaren’s supervisor’s supervisor Seymour Papert that’s not so surpising. The\r\nsecond demo I went to was by Michael Kölling<\/a> and Neil Brown from the University of Kent, looking at interfacing the Microsoft Kinect device\r\nwith Greenfoot<\/a>. Greenfoot is another\r\nenvironment for teaching programming – it’s a little more complex than Scratch\r\nand enables students to learn more Java code. The Kinect gives time-of-flight\r\ndata and images, and the Kinect Greenfoot interface really simplifies this\r\nnicely.<\/p>\r\n\r\n I’m going to have to investigate both of these tools – Scratch &\r\nGreenfoot – as I think they could both be very interesting for outreach and\r\nenrichment programmes with local schools. Just what’s wanted, given that we’ve\r\ngot a big EU funded schools project just starting off right now called Technocamps<\/a>. I can see lots of potential\r\nfor the Kinect stuff in particular, as it’ll link nicely with some research in\r\nAberystwyth that uses images and range data for robot navigation. All in all a\r\nvery good conference! The Technocamps & CAS people are running one next week in Swansea, and I’m looking forward already. If you’re interested in coming along, you can find out more & register here: http:\/\/caswales2011.eventbrite.com\/<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m just back from the Computing At School annual teachers’ conference, which was held in Birmingham University. It was a really fascinating conference – a mixture of policy, curriculum, practical advice, tips and tricks. The problem of computing in schools is now well known, with reports from the Royal Society, BCS, NESTA, and many other major organisations all singing the same song: we’re raising a generation of people who know how to consume computing technology, but not how to create it. CAS as a group have produced some very important contributions to this policy debate – in terms of the current state of computing education,Read More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-technocamps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":758,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions\/758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}