Planning computing in the national curriculum

This section looks at how you can plan to teach effective computing lessons. It builds on ideas in Chapter 1 that highlight a new focus on computer programming and computer science, and on applying the use of technology across the curriculum. National Curriculum (NC) Guidance The computing curriculum Programme of Study (PoS) begins by stating that, ‘a high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world’ (our italics). That is quite a claim. It suggests that we should be ambitious in our plans and encourage children to feel empowered by their computing skills to make a difference. Code.org echo this idea when they say, ‘the programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future’ (http://contest.catalysts.cc/en/ccc/the-wizards-of-the-future). We should then welcome the further suggestion from the NC Guidance that children should be ‘active participants in a digital world’ and aim to help them apply their computing skills to solve relevant problems, recognising that our digital world is one in which they are very much at home from an early age.