Computing Curriculum
Curriculum Intent – Content and Structure
The intended outcomes of what we teach:
| It is the aim of the Computing department to enable students to use technology to do good, by developing their skills and knowledge in the three strands of Computing. This will prepare them for a future in a world where the use of this technology is widespread. The three strands of Computing are:
We want to enthuse students to have an understanding far deeper than the interface that they currently operate. Regardless of whether students are learning to touch type, learning about the insides of a computer, or learning to problem solve, we want students to learn how to use technology for good. With such powerful tools, we can cause division or we can make the world fairer; we can cause harm or we can uplift. We want students to choose to use technology to do good, upholding our ethos to do justice and love kindness and to recognise the importance of humility in Computing. We aim to enable students to develop a love of learning for the subject and an understanding that there are no limits to their own development in programming and all other aspects of Computing. An important life skill for everyone to learn is to problem solve. Learning to use the strands of computational thinking will aid students with their Computer Science studies and with all their other subjects too. We aim to provide concrete examples so that they can see this is embedded within their everyday activities. Students will be given guidance on how to work safely online so that it will be second nature to carry out all the necessary steps for their own safety, as well as those around them. In Key Stage 3 (KS3), students will be given the opportunity to develop their digital literacy skills and their knowledge of common office software and later to develop their algorithmic thinking and coding skills. Learning the language of code is an important added bonus as students who develop their coding skills will be able to grasp the magic behind the computers. This will allow them to take their studies onto Key Stage 4 (KS4) and further into higher education if they desire, and ultimately secure a career within a large range of industries. |
Curriculum Implementation
Curriculum Content and Sequence
Year 7
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| Staying Safe Online Computational Thinking (students take part in the National Bebras Competition) Collaboration Skills Email Etiquette | IT Project Covers: Microsoft Forms (questionnaires) Excel (Spreadsheets for analysing data) PowerPoint (presentations) Word (written reports) Research Skills | Digital Citizens: IDEA (Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award) Programming –Scratch and JavaScript Touch Typing Machine Learning |
Year 8
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| Covered by other departments: Spreadsheets in Mathematics and Science - Presentation of material in Humanities - Data analysis in Humanities - Different uses of word processing in English - Graphical Skills in Product Design and Art - Code Club in Enrichment on rotation | ||
Year 9
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| Python Programming using Turtle My Digital World (how the web works), Back to the Future (a module looking at how the heroes of the past have helped shape the future of technology), Computational Thinking (national Bebras competition) | Data Representation Hardware and Software Text Based Programming Website development (HTML, CSS, Javascript) | Computer Networks Algorithms AI |
Year 10
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| Computer Systems (how the computer’s processor, memory and storage all work and how they work together, including how we store and represent data in binary form.) | Computational Thinking, Algorithms and Programming (how to approach problem solving). Programming fundamentals Students are given plenty of opportunities to put this theory of programming into practice through a series of programming projects in Python throughout the course | High vs Low languages, translators and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) to produce robust programmes, making them resistant to misuse. |
Year 11
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| How to Test Programmes thoroughly before releasing them. Network layouts and how they function and how to keep them secure, building skills in the ever-important realm of cyber security. | Types of Software and Operating Systems. How computers and computing affect ethical, cultural and environmental issues, including the issue of diversity. | Revision and Exam Technique |
Year 12
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| The Characteristics of Contemporary Processors, input, output and storage devices (Components of a computer and their uses) Data types (Binary, hexadecimal, two’s complement, floating point, bitwise manipulation and masks, character sets) Systems software | Application Generation (utilities, translators, stages of compilation) Data Structures Boolean Algebra | Computing Related Legislation Ethical, Moral, Social, Cultural Issues Software Development Introduce the project |
Year 13
Autumn | Spring | Summer |
| Computational Thinking Web Technologies Databases Networks Compression Project: Analysis, design, start development | Programming Techniques Computational Methods Algorithms Types of Programming Languages Project: finish development, evaluation, submit | Revision and Exam Technique |
The Rationale for the Content and Sequence of what we Teach
Year | Why we Teach this Content and how the Content and Sequence of Topics Benefits our Students. |
Year 7 | The rationale of Year 7 IT lessons is to introduce students to the technical tools that they will need throughout their time at Wren and beyond. They will feel confident using Microsoft 365 and know which tools to use for the job. We start with topics like the introduction to Teams and email etiquette to make sure that students have the tools to communicate with their teachers at a time when they are likely to need it most. We cover Online Safety early as students are dealing with the move up to secondary school and making new friends and finding new ways to keep in touch with friends from primary who have gone to different schools. They might be using social media for the first time. We want them to choose to be kind. We introduce Computational Thinking in time for them to take part in the national Bebras competition in November. Touch typing is also introduced quite early on to ensure that students can submit work electronically for the rest of their subjects as efficiently as possible. Rather than introducing Microsoft Office tools individually when the students do not really understand why they have to learn about spreadsheets for example, we have the students undertake a project and as they discover the need for a specific tool, we introduce them to that piece of software. This also allows the non-specialists who are likely to teach IT in Year 7 to tailor the lessons to something that they are interested in from their own subject. Throughout the year, we celebrate days like Ada Lovelace Day, which recognises women in STEM, and cross-curricular activities like World Book Day to embed that love of learning and so that students do not think reading is just for English lessons. We ensure that students become good digital citizens by introducing them to programmes such as the IDEA - Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award, and good global citizens by teaching them about how machine learning can be used to clean up the oceans. This is another cross curricular activity that ties in with when students are learning about the environment and the problem of plastics in the ocean in Science lessons. We want them to learn to use technology to do justice. Finally, we teach them graphical programming languages such as Scratch, which some students have been introduced to at Primary School. This is one of those areas that highlights the difference in Primary approaches to Computing as some students have not even seen Scratch before, some have a basic understanding of it, and only few have understood the programming constructs of selection sequence and iteration, or even input, output and variables. We do introduce some text based programming in the form of some JavaScript activities that we use to celebrate Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you). |
Year 8 | The ICT and digital literacy strands of Computing are covered by other subjects while the programming strand is offered in the form of a Code Club enrichment for Year 8s, offered on rotation so that all students get a chance to take part. |
Year 9 | Year 9 Computer Science starts with programming to ensure that students have a good grounding and can continually come back to the programming throughout the year. Programming is the kind of skill that needs to be practised often to ensure that the students make progress. If they learn the basics in Year 9, they are more likely to grasp the harder concepts in Years 10 and 11. We then move on to a module called Back to The Future, which teaches students about the historical figures that are important in Computer Science and how the contribution that they made in the past informs the technical developments of the future. This gives us an opportunity to show how diverse Computer Science is, highlighting figures for Black History Month and celebrating women in STEM for Ada Lovelace Day. Again, we make sure that students have been re-introduced to Computational Thinking in time to take part in the Bebras competition in November. As in Year 7, we cover staying safe online with My Digital World: how to be safe online, how to search effectively, how to spot fake news, etc. The central topic of Year 9 is Data Representation, understanding binary so that they know how numbers are represented and then how text is represented and how images and sound are represented. We also make sure that they cover hardware and software so that they understand what is inside a computer and how that all works. This leads on nicely to networks. We cover developing for the web in Year 9 because this is an important topics for them to understand even though it is no longer on the OCR GCSE spec. We have recently introduced an AI module to teach students about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. |
Years 10 - 13 | A note about the delivery of the GCSE and A Level courses: For most of Year 10, 11, 12 and 13, we use flipped learning, where students are given videos to watch and make notes on in preparation for the next lesson. This means students who do not understand the topic straight away can pause, rewind, rewatch the video and go at their own pace and fill in the gaps with the extra material that we give them to look at if necessary. This way students have a good understanding of what they do and do not know by the time they come into the lesson and can ask the teacher for clarification or further explanation on anything that they have not understood. The activities done in class are making sure that they really have grasped the concepts properly. This approach also allows for the most able to be stretched and challenged and for the least able to be given the help that they need. Not all topics lend themselves to this approach and occasionally lessons are delivered in the traditional way. Computer Science Alumni have told us that the flipped learning style prepares them well for the approach needed at University. |
Year 10 | We start with topics from Paper 1: Systems architecture, memory and storage and quite swiftly move onto data representation as these four topics fit very nicely with each other. It is important to cover data representation early so that students can be practising their binary skills throughout the course, because data representation is so central to much of what we do in Computer Science. We make sure that students have plenty of practise of programming right from the beginning and the lessons are split between theory and programming. We then make a start on Paper 2 with computational thinking and algorithms, so that students can plan their programmes using flow charts and/or pseudocode and the newly introduced Exam Reference Language. We then move onto the topic of programming languages and IDEs, so as students are programming they are making the best use of their IDEs. |
Year 11 | As the students have been programming throughout Year 10, by the time we get to the formal topics of programming fundamentals and producing robust programmes, the students can see that they have actually been doing this all along, which consolidates their learning. The students are more capable learners by the time they start Year 11 and able to handle the slightly harder topics of networks and network security, system software and the more nuanced topics of legislation and ethical issues, which give them further practice answering long answer questions. |
Year 12 | We focus mainly on Paper 1 topics in Year 12, making sure that we study topics such as data representation quite early so that the students can revisit that throughout the year. We also cover legislation and ethical, moral and cultural issues relatively early on so that students are introduced to how to answer these long answered questions early on. We interweave programming into the course throughout the year, for example introducing LMC and assembly low level programming at the same time as we learn about the systems architecture, so that students can see how data is transferred around the CPU by the instructions given in an LMC programme. We make sure that students are practising high level programming throughout the year so that they are confident programmers by the time they undertake the project in Year 13. We study Software Development towards the end of Year 12 so that this is fresh in the students’ minds as the project is being introduced. We normally introduce the project just before May Half Term of Year 12 so that the students can use their work experience to find suitable stakeholders for the project. We find students need quite a lot of coaching to think of an appropriate stakeholder and giving them that May Half Term and work experience soon after really helps with this. We then study Computational Thinking (which is the start of paper 2) at the end of Year 12 or at the beginning of Year 13, so that the students can use that in the write up of the analysis for their projects. Similarly, we study Databases around the same time, at the end of Year 12 or at the beginning of Year 13, as this ties in nicely with the design phase of their projects. |
Year 13 | We have traditionally started Paper 2 topics at the start of Year 13, but I would like to start introducing that towards the end of Year 12 instead. Although students have been practising their programming skills throughout Year 12, in Year 13, while they are doing the design of their projects, we start the module on programming techniques to ensure the students understand different programming constructs, such as object oriented programming that they may require for the development phase of their projects. Also, while they are doing the design phase, we revisit the importance of test data and algorithms so that that can be incorporated into the design phase. |
Key Stage 4 (KS4) and Key Stage 5 (KS5) only:
What exam board/syllabus do you teach?
At KS4: OCR Computer Science GCSE
At KS5: OCR Computer Science A Level
Why have you chosen this syllabus?
The reason we offer the Computer Science GCSE and A Level rather than any technical qualifications, is to suit the academic cohort that we have. I would love to offer options such as Cambridge Technicals vocational qualification to those students that that would be more suited to, but as a small department, we would rather focus on just GCSE and A Levels rather than spread ourselves too thinly.
In what ways is it suited to your students?
The reason we have chosen OCR as the exam board is that OCR has the best progression from GCSE to A Level and the OCR GCSE course prepares the students very well for the OCR A Level. At A Level the OCR project mimics real world programming far more effectively than the project aspect offered by other exam boards. In addition, some of the best resources out there have been created for the OCR spec and most of the highly regarded teachers who offer training, resources and support all endorse the OCR spec. There are particularly good support networks on social media for OCR Computer Science teachers.
Curriculum Implementation
The subject specific habits and behaviours we develop (or intend to develop) in our students
Subject Specific Habits and Behaviours | How we embed these in our students |
| Efficient note taking and consolidation
Problem solving
| At GCSE and A Level students learn to take notes while watching the Craig n Dave videos, consolidate and summarise essential points from the video. At A Level they follow the Cornell method of taking notes which will prepare them for the note taking required at university. The students programme in a language where the syntax (the grammar of the language) has to be followed and has to be correct in order for the programme to be able to run; this encourages both their attention to detail and noticing skills and their resilience as they debug the programme. This also ties in with problem solving as we teach the students different methods to debug their programmes including code walkthroughs and rubber duck debugging. We teach formal methods of computational thinking, including abstraction, decomposition, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking. These are important as the students approach programming, as is the TIME method (Try, Investigate, Make, Evaluate). Other recognised methods of programming such as pair programming and sabotage, teach the students collaboration and how to work together effectively. The language and keywords used in Computer Science often have very precise meanings that are narrower than the layman's use of those terms and it is important for students to use the right terminology even when those around them are not, eg using wifi to mean being online in general. |
Academy Ethos
Academy Curriculum Intent | How our department’s curriculum content and teaching approaches reflect the whole Academy ethos |
| A Curricular and Pastoral commitment to Micah 6v8: Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.
High Expectations of students’ behaviour for learning, learning progress and respect for our community.
Excellent and developing subject knowledge which inspires confidence in students. Effective collaboration across all parts of the Academy.
| We are kind to students and encourage kindness within lessons, expecting a supportive environment where mistakes and wrong answers are seen as an important part of learning. When sanctions are given, the reason is explained so that the students understand what they need to do to improve. We develop humbleness by not allowing students to call out answers and encourage, give them a clue or phone a friend and 50/50 lifelines. As teachers, we too are ready to admit when we are wrong or unsure when asked a question and either show the students how we would find out the answer or tell them that we will look into it and get back to them. Mouth not mouse ensures students help each other by telling the other person what to do rather than just doing it for them. Expectations are made clear at the start of the year and reiterated at the start of every term. Behaviour management is consistent throughout the department. Any incidents are logged and followed by an opportunity to reflect and to have one to one discussion with the student. Students have access to the school computers and make good use of their tablets. The students are exposed to a variety of applications like Kahoot, Quizlet, Seneca etc, to enhance their computing knowledge and skills through a fun element. The SOW has many interesting yet challenging modules that are engaging and relevant to their learning. We also have unplugged lessons sometimes where students learn through games or through practical activities (eg a human CPU) or sorting activities outdoors. The students have the knowledge to identify the difference between ICT and Computer Science, based on the different modules taught. They develop exceptional problem-solving skills and have a high level of competency in regard to computer skills. Having routines in place for start of lesson, like greeting students at the start with a starter task to complete. Check for 5, Do not be a space invader and Mouse not mouth are consistent phrases the students are familiar with. We have a consistent routine when dismissing students row by row once they are stood silently behind their desks with keyboards, mice, chairs (and shirts!) all tucked in with teacher at the door. Alternating between different teaching methods that can develop confidence in students and stimulate pupils’ active participation in their learning. Students are taught software/app skills that enable them to be active participants in all their lessons throughout the academy and in Year 7 are explicitly taught how to collaborate online effectively. Careful recruitment of high-quality staff who are then supported to develop their practice during departmental briefings. Carefully timetabled lessons to build staff experience and subject knowledge before tackling more difficult classes. All students have access to computers/tablets and can carry out research during the lesson. Awarding 9’s on the register, providing verbal feedback within lessons, use of apps to praise students, positive phone calls home, postcards, positive comments on marked HL etc. |
Implementation
Academy Ethos
Micah 6v8: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God | ||||
Curriculum Content Opportunities | Curriculum Delivery Opportunities | |||
| Justice | Students’ appreciation of each other’s work. Written and verbal feedback from teachers. Year 7 – Saving the Oceans – Machine Learning Year 9 – Learn about Copyright Laws and Fake News and avoiding BIAS in AI tools KS4 and KS5 – Ethical, Legal, Cultural and Environmental issues, including the Digital Divide. All year groups study Women in STEM and diversity within Computer Science. Students are explicitly reminded that Computer Science can make the world fairer by creating tools such as those that help with accessibility issues or translation between languages or even provide Shabbat pedestrian crossings for the Orthodox Jewish community prohibited from operating electrical machinery. | Plenaries in each lesson/peer marking Marking x3 a term Looking at the contribution made by women in STEM choosing women that fall under BAME. The need for copyright permission when using other people’s work and the impact of fake news including in a school setting. To investigate and discuss the impacts of computer technology, the need to consider it from different sides of the argument and take into account different possible points of view. | ||
| Kindness | Collaboration with peers. Peer review/comment on work, they develop skills in being honest whilst showing empathy to other’s feelings. | Learning to help each other (Mouth not Mouse). Check-in register and use of the reflect tools in Teams All students are equipped with skills like collaboration, communication and critical thinking, which students develop through working in groups to solve a problem. Using the sandwich method, feedback discussion starts with positive comments, and is followed by negative criticism, before appreciative words are used again. Peer talk when checking to see errors within codes when programming. | ||
| Humility | Collaboration with peers and learning to help each other. Learn about devices for physically challenged computer users. KS4/KS5 The digital divide. | To encourage more confident students to help, this will naturally teach humility amongst students. The need for different devices that makes computer technology accessible to all. To understand the range of social differences in access to and use of digital equipment and services. Educating the students to be considerate, while understanding the impact of inequality technology gap and the importance of inclusiveness. | ||
Please click here to access the full Computing curriculum document.