Welcome to Computer Science & ICT

In Year 7 you will have three or four lessons a fortnight. Don’t worry about how much you know now - we start right from the beginning. From your first lesson you’ll be taught how to correctly use the school system, access and browse the network and how to protect your login details and password. We all begin with a baseline assessment to see what you already know and what areas we need to work on.

We understand that every student will have had a different experience of Computing at Primary School, and we will work hard to identify any gaps in your knowledge to ensure we quickly get everybody up to a similar level so that we can all make progress together.

The teachers in our department are:

• Miss Southwood (Subject Lead)
• Mr McKune (Assistant Headteacher)
• Mr Ballantyne (Assistant Head of Ruskin House)
• Mr McGuigan (Teacher of Computer Science)

 

What will you be learning?

In Year 7 we usually begin learning about eSafety and Digital Citizenship so we all know how to protect ourselves online and how to be kind and contribute positively to the Digital World. You will also learn ICT skills such as creating presentations, word processing, desk-top publishing and some basic photo editing. You will study the fundamentals of computing and computer hardware; we learn about networks and the internet and our most popular unit - computer programming. By the end of Year 7 our aim is to ensure that all students have a good variety of ICT skills to have the confidence to undertake computing projects and assignments. We hope that over time you will develop the problem-solving and “computational thinking” skills required to be successful in our subject in the future.

We expect you to arrive for lessons on time and be well-prepared. Although all lessons will be in an ICT room and most of the work we do is at the computer, you are still expected to have the correct “offline” equipment such as a pen, pencil, ruler and rubber for any “unplugged” classwork. During lessons you will be encouraged to be respectful of the equipment, your teacher and your classmates; we want you to be supportive, use your imagination to solve problems and be resilient when it comes to working independently and responsible when working as part of a team (or with a partner). Computer Science is an exciting subject and will continue to shape our future; we are sure you’ll enjoy working with us and learning more and we can’t wait to meet you!

Want to find out more? Please follow the links below...

https://studio.code.org/s/express-2019	Code.org
	Learn the basics of computer science and Internet safety. At the end of the course, create your very own game or story you can share. 1. Dance Party. 2. Programming with Angry Birds. 3. Debugging with Scrat. 4. Collecting Treasure with Laurel. studio.code.org

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zvc9q6f 

https://lightbot.com/hour-of-code.html  (best viewed from a mobile device)

https://teachcomputing.org/home-teaching/key-stage-2  (If parents are keen to get involved - here’s some information and resources for programming skills students should have developed by the end of Key Stage 2)