Our expert Curriculum Team are on hand to ensure schools’ Computing has the maximum impact on their children’s learning. We’ve shared below some top Computing tips to use in the classroom. Sign up to our curriculum newsletter if you’d like to receive a monthly installment of creative and innovative Computing ideas just like these.

Our Curriculum Team will also be presenting short training sessions on topics for Computing in the classroom at Bett. They’ll be there all day every day so pop by to stand F130 to say hello and check out our training!

Kodu Game Lab

The Turn IT On Curriculum team offer many different training events including training Kodu Game Lab.

Kodu Game Lab is free software developed by Microsoft. Kodu is a 3D programming environment for children so that they can make their own games.

Kodu Game Lab gives children a chance to see an alternative type of programming to Scratch. It can be programmed to play on a computer or given directions to respond to Xbox controllers. The user is then able to save their game and open it on an Xbox to play their own game.

Ebooks

With e-books having a big impact and presence in our lives, why don’t you encourage your pupils to create their own? There are many different apps and websites that can help children with this, such as Book Creator (ios), and Comic Life (ios, mac, windows)

Topic – encourage children to create an e-book based on the terms topic. They can research throughout the term and add pictures, drawings and information as they learn it. At the end of the term they can publish their book to show their learning throughout the term.

Science – Why not use a tablet to take photos for your project e.g. minibeasts and add details that they have found out about them on each page.

Literacy – Children can take photos or draw pictures to put together with a story that they have already created in order to publish into their own ebook.

Computing Curriculum Apps

Tynker

iOS, Android, Windows

Tynker’s mobile apps let you learn basic programming concepts on iPads and Android-enabled tablets. Learn to code by solving puzzles; Build games, stories and interactive animations; Web and mobile access to all your projects.

Popplet

iOS, Windows,

In the classroom and at home, pupils can use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps pupils to think and learn visually. Pupils can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them.

CargoBot                                                                                                     

iOS

This game asks pupils to program an automated cargo crane to pick and drop coloured boxes in a particular pattern in particular places. There are limited set of instructions in the toolbox that pupils can use, and limited programming that the bot can take. Pupils have to think through on how to work out the solution given the restrictions, and implement that solution into the bot’s programming. A higher score will be given to those having the smallest number of instructions, which is appropriate to encourage, as all programmers attempt to make their programming smaller and more efficient.