KS3: The three challenges are graduated in difficulty, challenge 1 being the easiest. These can be used as one off exercises or as a pupil choice for a differentiated approach. Delivery can be set as individual work or ‘buddies’/peer-to-peer. Putting them in pairs for this exercise does work well in my experience. The outcomes can feed into a plenary to go over the steps involved in the construction of the shape. It lends nicely to a discussion of the mathematics involved in the angles used to draw the pattern in each challenge. Teacher solutions are part of this resource to enable a quick start and use in lessons. Teacher knowledge of the Scratch commands used in this resource is assumed.

Context: I used this with Year 7 and had them use the template to complete their game design before going near Scratch to start it. It offers focus, is a great way to get feedback to them and the template can be set as homework. Use: The template itself is structured and can assist the teacher in delivering the scaffolding, support and guidance as well as the instructions for completion. On completion each pupil has an effective roadmap for their coding which helps to keep them focused and on track. The coding challenges they then overcome are tailored to their specific game idea. The teacher has a means to give feedback on the plan which helps the pupil to hone their ideas. Designed for Scratch - can be altered for other blockly languages.

Year 8 had a PRIMM Python course in Year 7 but had forgotten a lot of content during the summer break. These three lessons were a response to that in order to rekindle their knowledge and skills and also to get them to think, practically, about programming. This set of three, 60-minute, lessons covers input-process-output, uses of selection and a programming challenge for the final lesson to build a simple multiple questions times table quiz that saves and outputs a score. The resource is made with Python 3.7 in mind. It comprises one labeled and editable PowerPoint for each lesson and supporting files. The Grog Python cheat sheet is not provided (as this is copyright material) which can be easily searched for on the internet. Lesson 3 makes use of a ‘parson’ sheet as a prompt for students which is a version of a solution for the problem containing scrambled lines of code to get them thinking about commands that are needed to solve the problem that are also a good source of syntactically correct code.

Aimed at getting Year 9 back into Python after the summer break. It shows an example of flowchart, pseudocode and python code for a simple short program. It is part of a larger 'paid' resource in my shop.

Year 7: This spreadsheet uses nutritional information as the basis for a spreadsheet designed to compare popular chocolate treats. The theme interests many students and the spreadsheet task contains hints as well as instructions for completion. The task includes some extension tasks and can be extended further in terms of the kind of charts can they could come up with. This resource test their ability to decide between when simple arithmetic formulas are used and when a formula containing a function is required. It focuses more on arithmetic operators in formulas and only uses the average function. However, as an exercise used after the introduction of spreadsheet it certainly tests the practical application of formulas to a set of actual data.

This simple activity is meant to be carried out using the powerpoint file on a collaborative platform (Office 365 or GSuite) that allows pupils to get a shared copy of the file on which to work. The PDF shows the kind of output possible with this activity (a range of standards are shown). Quite a good way to get them to investigate input/output devices without having to create a table and a set of 'pokemon' style cards - with good content - can form a good set of subject notes.

If you want to set the boundaries at the start of the year in Computer Science lessons then perhaps this presentation will be helpful. It’s used mainly for KS3 but can be used comfortably with KS4 as well. This goes on our class Team and gets referred to when needed. It is always a good idea to start how we mean to carry on with such a presentation.

I'd love feedback and a rating for this FREE resource. Thanks. This resource is intended for the Autumn term of Year 9 (KS3) Computer Science. It sets some challenges from which students can choose to achieve differentiation. Often it can be used to encourage those who choose the easiest option to gain confidence to move on to the more difficult challenges. The activity includes two examples and four challenge titles. This slide show file can be split in two with the solutions removed or solutions can be printed for students to compare with their own drawn solutions. Perhaps use draw.io or any preferred drawing package with the students or even better as an unplugged lesson with sheets of A3 paper and marker pens. I prefer the unplugged version myself. Activity can last easily last a 45 minute lesson including feedback/plenary session. Really allows you to move amongst the class to see how they approach the problems and use flowchart components.

This lesson is aimed at 13-14 year olds. These resources do not contain examples of copyrighted magazine pages. Suggestions are given on the lesson plan as to the types of magazine and topics that could be used. Resources are the lesson plan, a starter that assumes students have already been taught terminology in previous lessons, a worksheet that encourages them to focus design and content considerations and a DTP rubric that they can refer to when starting their practical work. This is ideally the first half of a double where students can use the second half to develop their individual work. The lesson assumes the use of Publisher and a handy reference booklet is also included.

Year 7 Resource: This activity is designed to get students to consider the power of formulas that make use of division in order to come up with observations about Earth in comparison to other planets in the solar system. As well as getting across some spreadsheet practical use it also provokes some observations for science on this topic in considering the sheer distances involved just in our solar system and the way Earth 'measures up' as a planet compared to other planets. There is massive scope for extension with this task into pupil investigation of charts/graphs but also in making comparisons about masses of planets, for instance, in answering questions such as: how many Earths would fit inside Jupiter?

These are picture prompts for an activity led by small groups or pairs of Year 10 IGCSE students. The idea is to print off on A4 and distribute around the room - on tables - the set of applications that require sensors. Obviously cover this activity after sensors have been formally covered. Students then research and feedback on the task. As an example I ran this task over a 90 minute double with the last 20 minutes allocated for feedback. Set the deadline time and see them go!

Aimed at KS3, Year 9 pupils who are returning to python after the summer break. It includes three examples, from easy to harder problems, to have pupils look at the connections between flowcharts, pseudocode and programming in a target language - in this case Python 3.6.

This was programmed by me as a teaching aid to allow Year 9 pupils to see both how the Caesar Cipher works and to link it directly to programming and computational thinking. It can be used to have students identify the algorithm, use of items such as strings and lists and other variables as well as procedural programming and as an example of the practical use of Tkinter to code the graphical user interface. Another activity is to have pupils comment the program and to explain the job carried out by each procedure. Sensible names are used throughout the code for ease of tracing and to make it more easily understood. Code also contains some comments. Please note: on download rename the caesar1.txt file to caesar1.py and keep the gif file in the same file directory as the program file for the image of Julius Caesar to appear in the program.