Following on from my post about programming, I wanted to share the links that I have collated. Some of these came from comments to my post, some from tweets I received and some are examples I had myself. I thought it best to share my presentation with you all as I know lots of people want to see what sort of programming and game design happens within schools. It will also be useful for me to give my blog address to the audience knowing that the resources are already live!
I know that there are other examples of programming and game design but this is what we do, or will be doing, this year.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone that shared a site or resource with me and to the people that helped me think about what to include too. I hadn’t thought about Beebots, but this is Reception-level programming, so thank you @tricias.
Now, this isn’t a fully in-depth presentation by any means but it will provide me with some examples to show when I am at Bletchley Park tomorrow in front of gaming legends and industry experts (and some teachers at the back heckling and causing mischief!)
I hope you find some of these examples useful and if you have any questions, feel free to give me a shout.
Great to see a serious post on getting children programming. I do worry where the next generation of coders will come from now that ICT provision at primary is generally absorbed into other subjects.
I’ve variously used Flash, GameMaker and Python to teach programming in years 5 and 6.
GameMaker is fantastic as it has a simple icon based drag and drop interface. It teaches the fundamentals of event driven programming brilliantly.
Flash is a little more complex and suited to more able pupils. Having said that, I ran a Flash Club in a few schools back in the day when Macromedia would let primary schools have a 15 user + 2 teacher licence for £299. Adobe soon squashed this when they bought them out (despite my repeated protestations whenever they ask me for any kind of feedback!) Consequently I have not used it since.
My most recent programming teaching was an after school G&T programming club last year. For this I decided to use Python as it was easy for the children to run at home regardless of what computer they had. The children (a good mix of boys AND girls) really enjoyed the challenge and did incredibly well.
As for the future, I really like the look of Kodu as a way of teaching the fundamentals of game programming without actually writing code. I am quite keen also to use KPL (Kids’ Programming Language) for a more traditional text based coding approach.
Mark
@hackneyICT
Just to let you know. Isobel’s Scratch pyramid tour mentioned on slide 11 of your presentation was recently awarded first place in the animation category for this summer’s TES Creative ICT Challenge – http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6087183