Over the last year or so I’ve been working hard making preparations for the new Computing curriculum coming into action from September this year. In my school we are going to adopt the Computing At School(CAS) Progression Pathways as a method for assessing and levelling students. For students already in key stage 3 we will be freezing their old ICT levels and starting fresh by assessing them against the Progression Pathways levels for Computing. I have yet to develop an initial Computing assessment but it is something I am going to be working on over the next few months.
So far, below is what the curriculum will look like for Key Stage 3 (some schemes of work are yet to be written and some are being updated with extra parts). I thought I would share this as I know there are a lot of schools needing to plan for the new curriculum so please feel free to use/adapt this model if you find it useful. Once they are complete I’ll be adding all schemes of work to the resources section on here.
Year 7
| Topic | Overview |
| 7.1 Digital Literacy – “All About Me” |
This will incorporate a baseline assessment and cover some of the more traditional ICT skills. I’m adapting this from my previous Skill Building scheme of work and condensing down significantly to cover the key, essential, points. |
| 7.2 Game Creation in Kodu Game Lab | I’ve adapted my original Kodu scheme of work into a new and improved version covering all the main skills needed and more in-depth game design and analysis. |
| 7.3 Web Awareness | A Spiderman-themed topic which teaches children the fundamentals of the World Wide Web, including how search engines work, packet switching, Internet safety and security and finishing with web design using HTML and CSS. |
| 7.4 What are Computers? | EDIT: NOW COMPLETE |
| 7.5 Introduction to Programming | For this topic I am going to completely revamp my Game Control scheme of work, so that rather than focussing on games it will focus on specific programming terminology and algorithms. I still intend to use Scratch for this but will also incorporate examples of the algorithms in text-based languages too and include exercises where they will begin to read and interpret code. |
Year 8
| Topic | Overview |
| 8.1 Grand Designs | I’ve been teaching this topic for a few years now. It covers some of the more traditional ICT skills with the addition of 3D modelling using Sketchup. I might add some additional control elements to this using Flowol so children would design their house and then plan for some automated systems to go inside. |
| 8.2 Python Magic | This is a scheme of work for teaching children the basics of programming using Python. |
| 8.3 Animation Project | This is an existing scheme of work where the students design, create and evaluation an animation for a specific purpose. Although it is essentially complete, the assessment needs adapting to the new framework. |
| 8.4 Ingenious Inventions | I’ve yet to begin creating this scheme of work but the plan is for students to come up with inventions that will use a computer control system of some kind, this will focus on using Flowol to design the systems and I might try to incorporate the use of Raspberry Pis here too. |
| 8.5 What are Computers Part II | For the final topic in year 8 I’m aiming to build on the basic understanding of computers the students would have gained in year 7. I have yet to plan the content for this fully though. |
Year 9
| Topic | Overview |
| 9.1 Wonders of PhotoShop | This is a scheme of work teaching the fundamentals of Photoshop. I intend to extend this somewhat so I can cover binary representation of images to give learners an understanding of how the pictures they create are stored on a computer. |
| 9.2 Web Design | This scheme of work will teach learners how to create their own website using HTML, CSS and Javascript. |
| 9.3 Computer Crime Lab | This topic will cover the creation and searching of a criminal database as well as giving an understanding of computer crimes and an understanding of cryptography. |
| 9.4 Wedding Planner | This is a scheme of work that has been delivered at my school for some time (although I haven’t delivered it myself yet). It’s been a successful way of delivering spreadsheets and ICT skills around design as well. It’s popular as I teach at an all girls school and the techniques learnt can be applied to other scenarios or events too. This will incorporate many of the skills from the Edexcel GCSE in ICT which we currently offer in year 10. |
| 9.5 Entry Level Computing | I haven’t fully decided on the final topic of year 9 yet although I am thinking of offering OCR’s Entry Level Computing certificate. |
If you have any ideas or suggestions for any of these topics I’d love to hear from you! Just post a comment below. I hope you’ve found this post useful!