by Professor Judy Robertson, University of Edinburgh
24 April 2019
SICSA Education has recently sponsored the production of a handbook to help primary teachers to teach the new computing strand of the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland. For the first time, children aged 3 years upwards will learn about key computing concepts as part of the Technologies curriculum. This is a great step forwards, because it will lay the foundations for understanding the fundamentals of process and information which young people can build on if they elect to study computing in the senior phase of high school. To help primary teachers and early years practitioners get to grips with the new curriculum, and give them lesson ideas, a group of volunteers got together to write a handbook – Kate Farrell (Computing at Schools Scotland, Judy Robertson (University of Edinburgh), Quintin Cutts (University of Glasgow) and Richard Connor (University of Stirling).
The guide has already proved popular with schools – for example, a parent wrote to tell us “I’ve been working with my daughter’s primary school and using the guide to help introduce CS throughout the school. The guide has been instrumental in rolling out a curriculum for P4 upwards”. It has also been adapted for use with West Dunbarton Council. We are currently working on a similar guide for the early stages of high school.
We have posted a paper copy of the guide to all the primary schools in Scotland. Why not check with your local school to see if they received it, or if you can give them a hand to teach some programming lessons? You can download a free copy of the guide at www.teachcs.scot.
