It is vital that young children gain good digital literacy skills and understanding of computing concepts, which they can then build on as they grow up. Digital technology is here to stay, and as Sethi De Clercq points out in his article, we need to prepare our youngest learners for circumstances and jobs that don’t yet exist.

Primary computing education: Inspiration and ideas

Issue 21 of Hello World covers a big range of topics in the theme of primary computing education, including:

• Cross-curricular project ideas to keep young learners engaged
• Perfecting typing skills in the primary school classroom
• Using picture books to introduce programming concepts to children
• Toolkits for new and experienced computing primary teachers, by Neil Rickus and Catherine Archer
• Explorations of different approaches to improving diversity in computing and instilling a sense of belonging from the very start of a child’s educational journey, by Chris Lovell and Peter Marshman

The issue also has useful news and updates about our work: we share insights from our primary-specialist learning managers, tell you a bit about the research presented at our ongoing primary education seminar series, and include some relevant lesson plans from The Computing Curriculum.

As always, you’ll find many other articles to support and inspire you in your computing teaching in this new issue. Topics include programming with dyslexia, exploring filter bubbles with your learners to teach them about data science, and using metaphors, similes, and analogies to help your learners understand abstract concepts.

What do you think?

This issue of Hello World focusses on primary computing education because readers like you told us in the annual readers’ survey that they’d like more articles for primary teachers.

We love to hear your ideas about what we can do to continue making Hello World interesting and relevant for you. So please get in touch on Twitter with your thoughts and suggestions.

The post Hello World #21 out now: Focus on primary computing education appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

How are you preparing young children for a world filled with digital technology? Technology use of our youngest learners is a hotly debated topic. From governments to parents and from learning outcomes to screen-time rules, everyone has an opinion on the ‘right’ approach. Meanwhile, many young children encounter digital technology as a part of their world at home. For example in the UK, 87 percent of 3- to 4-year-olds and 93 percent of 5- to 7-year-olds went online at home in 2023. Schools should be no different.

As educators, we have a responsibility to prepare learners for life in a digital world. We want them to understand its uses, to be aware of its risks, and to have access to the wide range of experiences unavailable without it. And we especially need to consider the children who do not encounter technology at home. Education should be a great equaliser, so we need to ensure all our youngest learners have access to the skills they need to realise their full potential.

Exploring technology and the world

A major aspect of early-years or kindergarten education is about learners sharing their world with each other and discovering that everyone has different experiences and does things in their own way. Using digital technology is no different.

Allowing learners to share their experiences of using digital technology both accepts the central role of technology in our lives today and also introduces them to its broader uses in helping people to learn, talk to others, have fun, and do work. At home, many young learners may use technology to do just one of these things. Expanding their use of technology can encourage them to explore a wider range of skills and to see technology differently.

In their classroom environment, these explorations can first take place as part of the roleplay area of a classroom, where learners can use toys to show how they have seen people use technology. It may seem counterintuitive that play-based use of non-digital toys can contribute to reducing the digital divide, but if you don’t know what technology can do, how can you go about learning to use it? There is also a range of digital roleplay apps (such as the Toca Boca apps) that allow learners to recreate their experiences of real-world situations, such as visiting the hospital, a hair salon, or an office. Such apps are great tools for extending roleplay areas beyond the resources you already have.

Another aspect of a child’s learning that technology can facilitate is their understanding of the world beyond their local community. Technology allows learners to explore the wider world and follow their interests in ways that are otherwise largely inaccessible. For example:

• Using virtual reality apps, such as Expeditions Pro, which lets learners explore Antarctica or even the bottom of the ocean
• Using augmented reality apps, such as Octagon Studio’s 4D+ cards, which make sea creatures and other animals pop out of learners’ screens
• Doing a joint project with a class of children in another country, where learners blog or share ‘email’ with each other

Each of these opportunities gives children a richer understanding of the world while they use technology in meaningful ways.

Technology as a learning tool

Beyond helping children to better understand our world, technology offers opportunities to be expressive and imaginative. For example, alongside your classroom art activities, how about using an app like Draw & Tell, which helps learners draw pictures and then record themselves explaining what they are drawing? Or what about using filters on photographs to create artistic portraits of themselves or their favourite toys? Digital technology should be part of the range of tools learners can access for creative play and expression, particularly where it offers opportunities that analogue tools don’t.

Using technology is also invaluable for learners who struggle with communication and language skills. When speaking is something you find challenging, it can often be intimidating to talk to others who speak much more confidently. But speaking to a tablet? A tablet only speaks as well as you do. Apps to record sounds and listen back to them are a helpful way for young children to learn about how clear their speech is and practise speech exercises. ChatterPix Kids is a great tool for this. It lets learners take a photo of an object, e.g. their favourite soft toy, and record themselves talking about it. When they play back the recording, the app makes it look like the toy is saying their words. This is a very engaging way for young learners to practise communicating.

Technology is part of young people’s world

No matter how we feel about the role of technology in the lives of young people, it is a part of their world. We need to ensure we are giving all learners opportunities to develop digital skills and understand the role of technology, including how people can use it for social good.

This is not just about preparing them for their computing education (although that’s definitely a bonus!) or about online safety (although this is vital — see my articles in Hello World issue 15 and issue 19 for more about the topic). It’s about their right to be active citizens in the digital world.

So I ask again: how are you preparing young children for a digital world?

Subscribe to the Hello World digital edition for free

The first experiences children have with learning about computing and digital technologies are formative. That’s why primary computing education should be of interest to all educators, no matter what the age of your learners is. This issue covers for example:

• Instilling a sense of belonging in children
• Using picture books to introduce programming concepts to children
• Perfecting typing skills
• Cross-curricular project ideas to keep young learners engaged at the end of primary school

And there’s much more besides. So don’t miss out on this upcoming issue of Hello World — subscribe for free today to receive every PDF edition in your inbox on the day of publication.

The post Preparing young children for a digital world | Hello World #21 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Whether you plan lessons on a Computing topic, develop curriculum content, or even write curriculum policy, you have to make choices. What are you going to include and what is less of a priority? You have to consider time constraints and access to resources, prior learning and maybe even pupil interests. You probably also have to consider the wider curriculum context. Well, here is my first principle to help you: computing systems should be the foundation of your Computing curriculum.

A computing systems epiphany

As a primary teacher, when I first began writing Computing lesson plans for children aged 9 to 10, I started with programming. This was a very visual entry into Computing, and children were excited to create projects that were familiar to them, such as games and animations. However, as my understanding of Computing grew, I realised that something was missing.

My learners could explain what an algorithm is, as well as explaining that a program is ‘a set of instructions that runs on a computer to tell it what to do’. Both of these met the curriculum needs, but I wasn’t convinced that they could link these two concepts together. Could they connect what they were doing on a floor robot to the computing systems around them? Did they understand what a computer was? Well… I asked them to see what they’d say!

According to my class, a computer was:

• A piece of technology
• A keyboard and a screen
• A search engine
• A machine used for work
• A metal brain
• A machine with a keyboard
• An information device
• Electric

This very simple question highlighted a wealth of alternate conceptions about programming and computing systems. The other commonality of my learners’ definitions was that they described the computer’s function, as if, in order to define what a computer is, we just need to know what it does. This view of a definition greatly limits learners’ ability to understand what potential computers have beyond personal use.

My learners had two discrete chunks of knowledge: how to program a floor robot, and that laptops were computers. However, without a bridge to connect them, this learning was disjointed. Learners needed to have a concrete, conceptual understanding of ‘what a computer is’ before they could start to comprehend the more abstract role of a program in that system.

Knowledge of computing systems empowers people to take control of technology and not just consume it.

Beyond the experiences of my young learners, we see examples of a lack of understanding about computing systems all the time in society. Many competent users of software are able to regularly complete the tasks that they need, but if one day something doesn’t work, they do not know how to find a solution. Equally, many people enjoy exploring digital making projects, yet if they want to personalise the project, they don’t know what they can or can’t change to do this. Knowledge of computing systems empowers people to take control of technology and not just consume it.

Planning computing content today

Both of these examples highlight the importance of introducing computing systems as both life skills and as support for developing other areas of computing. More recently, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been creating 100 hours of curriculum content in partnership with non-profit organisation Amala Education. Through this content we aim to give refugee learners who may never have used technology enough understanding to build a website that encourages social change.

Whilst we know that the material needs to include some foundational knowledge of computing systems, we must first consider the core content that learners must understand to achieve the end goal, such as:

• Webpage creation 
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• Project management 
• Project development

These areas of learning are a great place to start as, undeniably, learners aren’t going to be able to build a website without knowing the process of creating a website, the languages used to create web pages, or the project management skills to see a project from start to finish.

This could be the entirety of the content, but instead, I encourage you to think back to those children who could program but didn’t know on what devices programs could run. We need to connect the core content to that foundational content: how is building a website related to computing systems?

Prior knowledge

All learning is built on prior knowledge, even if that prior knowledge has been gained through life experience and not formal education. To build a website, we need to know how to type and use a mouse. We need to know what a website is, why people use websites, and what sort of media is found on them. Beyond that, we need to know how the files that we are creating are being shared with other people. We need to understand that a computer can communicate with another computer and what the process is to make that happen. None of this learning is the core content of building a website, but if you tried to build a website without understanding these things, it would be difficult to do.

All learning is built on prior knowledge, even if that prior knowledge has been gained through life experience and not formal education.

As the learners we support together with Amala Education might have no prior experience of using technology, we needed to ensure that enough foundational computing systems content was built into the learning sequence — things such as:

• Recognising digital devices
• Decomposing computing systems
• Digital painting (mouse skills)
• Combining text and images (desktop publishing)
• Networks and the internet
• Internet searching

By incorporating this content into the learning sequence, we ensure that learners do not just learn a process for creating a website. They understand the impact of the choices they make when building a website, they have the skills to implement their ideas, and they can connect their understanding to solve any unexpected challenges they find along the way. This more holistic approach should support learners’ knowledge transfer and offer them a much broader range of opportunities. 

This more holistic approach should support learners’ knowledge transfer and offer them a much broader range of opportunities.

Whatever your curriculum requires, you will have the core content you need to teach. This could be the requirements of your standardised curriculum, it could be the specific project you’re trying to build, or it could be the aspirations that you have for your students. However, rather than stopping at that part of your learning sequence, take a step back and consider the prior knowledge you’re connecting to. I expect you will find that computing systems is what you need to ensure learners’ new knowledge has a solid foundation.

Read the new Hello World issue today

Computing systems and networks is one of those computer science topics in which misconceptions abound. Hello World issue 20 focuses on how you can support your learners to grasp even the tricky ideas within this topic, giving you practical ideas, activities, and insights from practicing educators. Download your free PDF copy now, and subscribe to never miss an issue.

The post Computing curriculum fundamentals | Hello World #20 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This is where our two special editions of Hello World come in: The Big Book of Computing Content and The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. Both available as free downloads, they help you reflect on what you teach within Computing and how you teach it.

What you teach: The Big Book of Computing Content

Computing is a broad and interdisciplinary subject, and different curricula and courses around the world focus on different aspects of it. For all of us, therefore, computing is framed by the curricula with which we are working and the terms which we’re using to talk about the subject. Over the past years at the Foundation, we have been developing a Computing taxonomy to help describe the different aspects of the subject. The Big Book of Computing Content is based on this taxonomy. The aim of this special edition of Hello World is to illustrate the breadth of Computing, and to model language that describes the different concepts, knowledge, and skills that comprise it.

We have organised this Big Book according to our taxonomy’s 11 content strands and also included progressive learning outcomes for each strand at different stages of learning. These outcomes are not prescriptive; instead they illustrate the wide applications of the subject by highlighting the kinds of knowledge and understanding that learners could develop in each area of Computing.

We hope that The Big Book of Computing Content encourages educators to reflect on all aspects of Computing and how they interconnect, as well as on the language we use to describe Computing. Whether the Big Book helps you to discover new aspects to Computing, to think about the subject differently, or simply to see the differences in how we as educators talk about our subject, the time you spend reflecting is important and valuable.

How you teach: The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy

One part of our work as educators is understanding the breadth of Computing and the specific ideas within it. The other part is reflecting on how we teach the subject: the specific methods, strategies, and practices we can use with our learners. The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy describes a range of teaching approaches framed around our 12 pedagogical principles for teaching Computing. Each research-informed principle either reflects how general-purpose pedagogy applies within Computing or explores pedagogies specific to Computing itself. This Big Book consists of research summaries as well as practical articles from educators which illustrate how you can apply the different pedagogies.

Rather than prescribing a set of principles that educators must follow, the aim of The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy is to help you develop your understanding of a range of pedagogical approaches which you can select, apply, and adapt to suit your context.

Reflect to develop your knowledge and agency

Ultimately we want to support all Computing and Computer Science educators to build their understanding of subject matter (that is, content) and pedagogy, or what is called pedagogical content knowledge (PCK, a term popularised by Lee Shulman). Combining your PCK with your grasp of the context of your learners, curricula, and setting will enable you to choose suitable practices for your content and context.

We hope that you find the two Big Books to be valuable reference tools to help you and your peers reflect on what it is you mean when you talk about Computing, and on how you teach the concepts, knowledge, and skills within it. Both books are available as free PDF downloads.

We would love to hear examples of how you have used The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy or The Big Book of Computing Content to inform your own teaching practice or to discuss practice with colleagues. Tell us in the comments.

The post Reflecting on what we teach in computing education and how we teach it appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

A special edition on the content we teach in the Computing classroom

While Hello World‘s first special edition, The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, focused on how we can teach Computing, this new book is about what we mean by Computing. It aims to demonstrate the breadth of knowledge and skills contained within this constantly evolving subject.

We have structured the new special edition around our taxonomy for formal Computing education, to which we map all our formal education resources. Originally we developed the taxonomy when we started work in the consortium setting up and delivering England’s National Centre for Computing Education, and specifically when we designed the 500 hours of classroom materials in The Computing Curriculum.

Our Computing taxonomy comprises eleven strands and aims to categorise Computing conceptual knowledge and skills to both demonstrate the breadth of Computing as a discipline, and to provide a common language to describe the different areas of study and competencies.

The Big Book of Computing Content complements our first Hello World special edition and follows the same principle of introducing readers to up-to-date research, followed by our favourite stories from past Hello World issues by educators who put that content into practice. For each of the eleven strands in our taxonomy, we also present a table of learning outcomes, which provides examples of knowledge and skills that learners from ages 5 to 19 could develop at each stage of their formal computing education. 

Your thoughts on The Big Book of Computing Content

Hello World’s first special edition was very popular around the world, with educators setting up Big Book of Computing Pedagogy reading groups, leaders using the book to support pre-service teachers, and even of an upcoming translation into Thai.

We’ve already started to hear similar stories about The Big Book of Computing Content from Hello World readers, including CSEdResearch dedicating their Computer Science Education Discussion Group to all things Big Book of Computing Content in its first week of publication.

We’d love to hear from more educators about how you are using this new special edition, and how it complements your reading of the first Big Book.

You can also subscribe now to get each new Hello World — whether regular issue or special edition — straight to your digital inbox, for free! And if you’re based in the UK and do paid or voluntary work in education, you can subscribe for free print issues.

PS Have you listened to our Hello World podcast yet? Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

The post Out now: Hello World’s special edition on Computing content appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

England’s Computing curriculum requires that all learners be taught the subject between ages 5 and 16, and it consists of only 25 statements outlining expectations for learners. To accompany this curriculum, we started developing a framework to help us describe the subject of Computing, and in particular the common threads running through it.

A 2012 report by the Royal Society presented the breadth of computing by dividing it into three areas: information technology, computer science, and digital literacy. Although this goes some way to describe computing as a discipline, in our view this model creates artificial divides between aspects of the subject according to whether they are seen as more or less technical. Our more holistic view of computing recognises that concepts and skills within the subject are far more interconnected.

Principles for our taxonomy

When we set out to develop our framework, the goal was to provide a way to look at and describe the subject of Computing as a set of interconnected topics; the framework doesn’t define standards or curricula. There are, of course, many ways of organising the subject matter, implemented through exam specifications, textbooks, schemes of learning, and various progression guides. For our framework, we reviewed examples of each of these, from England and beyond, and decided on some organisational principles:

• Our framework should describe the whole of Computing, incorporating computer science, information technology, and digital literacy
• The framework should be applicable across primary and secondary education, meaning it should be useful for categorising the knowledge encountered by all learners, from five-year-olds to our oldest secondary school students
• While inspired by England’s national curriculum, the framework should be independent of any particular exam specification and capable of adaptation to new curricula
• The framework should represent Computing as a discipline that combines a broad mixture of concepts and skills 

Developing the taxonomy

Following these principles, we identified ten content themes, or strands, that thread through a learner’s journey in Computing education. We call this framework representing the knowledge and skills that make up the subject our Computing taxonomy. As the Foundation is part of the consortium that established the National Centre for Computing Education in England, our taxonomy became a cornerstone of the work of the Centre, providing a common language to describe Computing in English schools and shaping the educational content we created for online teacher training courses, the classroom resources that make up the Computing Curriculum, and the material on the Isaac Computer Science platform for A level and GCSE learners and teachers.

Computing is, of course, a constantly evolving field and as such, our taxonomy evolves with it. Since 2018 we’ve iterated our taxonomy to incorporate new things we’ve learned, for example relating to the rapid developments of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in recent years. AI now is a significant area of study and represented as its own strand in our current taxonomy, bringing the number of strands up to eleven:

• Effective use of tools
• Safety and security
• Design and development
• Impact of technology
• Computing systems
• Networks
• Creating media
• Algorithms and data structures
• Programming
• Data and information
• Artificial intelligence

Given the interconnected nature of Computing, we embrace a best-fit approach to content categorisation, choosing the most appropriate strand(s) for each idea. In developing our Computing taxonomy, we determined that four of the strands (the horizontal strands in the diagram) were best taught interwoven with the others, in context rather than as discrete topics. A good example of this is the strand ‘Safety and security’, which focuses on supporting learners to realise the benefits of digital technology without putting themselves and others at risk. While it would be possible to teach this strand as one discrete set of lessons, revisiting it throughout a learner’s journey provides regular reinforcement as well as grounding in the context of other strands.

Within the strands, we have also identified progressive learning outcomes for each stage of learning. These learning outcomes are illustrative of the kinds of knowledge and understanding that learners could develop in each area of Computing. They are not prescriptive and instead aim to illustrate the wide applications of the discipline.

Coming soon: The Big Book of Computing Content

On 24 October, we will publish The Big Book of Computing Content. Framed by our taxonomy, The Big Book of Computing Content presents our work so far in describing the diverse range of concepts and skills that comprise Computing. It also includes the illustrative learning outcomes we’ve identified.

This will be the second special edition of Hello World, our free magazine for computing educators. The new Big Book complements our first special edition, The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, in which we lay out 12 key principles for teaching the subject.

The Big Book of Computing Content will be available in print and as a free PDF download; if you subscribe now, you’ll receive the PDF in your inbox on publication day.

Share your thoughts on our taxonomy

We hope our taxonomy and the new Big Book enable you to reflect on the breadth of Computing and resonate with your teaching. Please share your reflections, in the comments below or by tagging us on social media, if you’d like to help us develop the taxonomy further.

The post A taxonomy of Computing content for education appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

We’ve asked some of our programme leads to tell you what’s new in their respective areas. We hope that you’ll come away with a good idea of the breadth and depth of teacher support that’s on offer. Is there something we aren’t doing yet that we should be? Tell us in the comments below.

Sway Grantham has been at the forefront of writing resources for our Teach Computing Curriculum over the last three years. The Curriculum is part of the wider National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) and provides hundreds of free classroom resources for teachers, from Key Stage 1 to 4. Each resource includes lesson plans, slides, activity sheets, homework, and assessments. Since we published the Curriculum in 2020, all lessons have been reviewed and updated at least once. Managing the process of continuously improving these resources is a key part of Sway’s work.

Hi Sway, what updates have you been making to the Teach Computing Curriculum to help teachers this year? 

We make changes to the Teach Computing Curriculum all the time! However, specific things we are excited about ahead of the new school year are updates to how our content is presented on the website so that it’s really easy to see which unit you should be teaching in each half term. We’ve also renamed some of the units to make it clearer what they cover. And to help Key Stage 3 teachers launch Computing in secondary school with skills that are foundational for progress through the requirements of the Key Stage 3 curriculum, we’ve updated the first Year 7 unit, now called Clear messaging in digital media.

You recently asked for teachers’ feedback as part of an annual impact survey. What did you find out?

We are still in the process of looking through the feedback in detail, but I can share some high-level insights. 96% of teachers who responded to the survey gave a score between 7 and 10 for recommending that other teachers use the Teach Computing Curriculum. Over 80% reported that the Teach Computing Curriculum has improved their confidence, subject knowledge, and the quality of their teaching ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’. Finally, over 90% of respondents said the Curriculum is effective at supporting teachers, developing teachers’ subject knowledge, and saving teachers’ time.

We are grateful to the 907 people who took part in the survey! You have all helped us to ensure the Curriculum has a positive impact on teachers and learners throughout England and beyond.

James Robinson dedicates his work at the Foundation to creating free pedagogical resources that underpin the classroom practice of computing teachers worldwide. He has led the creation of the Pedagogy Quick Reads and the Research Bytes newsletter for the NCCE, and the development of our 12 principles of computing pedagogy, available as a handy poster. He also works on our Hello World magazine, produces the associated Hello World podcast, and curates Hello World’s special issues, such as The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy.

James, why is it so important for teachers to underpin their classroom practice with best-practice pedagogical approaches? 

In order to teach any area of the curriculum effectively, educators need to understand both the content they are teaching and the most effective ways to deliver that content. Computing is a broad discipline made up of lots of inter-connected knowledge. Different areas of the subject benefit from different approaches, and this may vary depending on the experience of the learners and the context within which they are learning. Understanding which approaches are best suited to different content helps educators support learners effectively.

Computing education research related to school-aged learners is still in its early stages compared to other subjects, and new approaches and pedagogies are being developed, tested, and evaluated. Staying aware of these developments is important for educators and that’s why it’s something the Foundation is dedicated to supporting.

What do you have in store for teachers this year?  

This year we continue to share best practice and hear from educators applying new ideas in their classroom through Hello World magazine and podcast. Educators should also keep a look out for our second Hello World special edition exploring the breadth and depth of Computing. To get hold of a copy of this later this year, make sure you’re subscribed to Hello World.

Allen Heard and his team have very recently completed a huge project: creating a full curriculum of GCSE topics and associated questions for Isaac Computer Science, our free online learning platform for teachers and students. The new topics cover the entirety of the GCSE exam board specifications for AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas, OCR, and WJEC, and are integrated with our existing A level computer science resources. They are great to pick up and use for classwork, homework, and revision.  

Allen, what has gone into the making of these new GCSE resources?

I think one of the biggest and most important things that’s been evident to me while working on this project is the care and thought that our content creators have put into each and every piece they worked on. To the end user it will simply be material on a web page, but sitting behind each page are countless discussions involving the whole team around how to present certain facts, concepts, or processes. Sometimes these discussions have even caused us to reevaluate our own thinking around how we deliver computer science content. We have debated the smallest things such as glossary terms, questioning every word to make sure we are as clear and concise as possible. Hopefully the care, expertise, and dedication of the team shines through in what really is a fantastic source of information for teachers and learners.

What do you have in store for teachers and learners this year?

With 96% of teachers and 88% of students reporting that the content is of high quality and easily accessible, we still need to continue to support them to ultimately enable learners to achieve their potential. Looking ahead, there is still lots of work to do to make sure Isaac offers the best possible user experience. And we plan to add a lot more questions to really bolster the numbers of questions at varying levels of difficulty for learners. This will have the added benefit of being useful for any teachers wanting to up-skill too! A massive strength of the platform is its questions, and we are really keen to give as wide a range of them as possible.

Tamasin Greenough Graham leads the team at Code Club, our global network of free, in-school coding clubs for young people aged 9 to 13. In Code Clubs, participants learn to code while having fun getting creative with their new skills. Clubs can be run by anyone who wants to help young people explore digital technologies — you don’t need coding experience at all. The Code Club team offers everything you need, including coding projects with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, and lots of resources to help you support your club members. They are also on hand to answer your questions. 

Tamasin, what kind of support can teachers expect when they decide to set up a Code Club?

Running a Code Club really is simple and a lot of fun! We have free training to suit everyone, including webinars that guide you through getting started, a self-study online course you can take to prepare for running your Code Club, and drop-in online Q&A sessions where you can chat about your questions to our friendly team or to other educators who run clubs. 

Once you have registered your Code Club, you’ll get access to an online dashboard packed with useful resources: from guidance on preparing and delivering your first session, to certificates to celebrate your club members’ successes, and unplugged activities for learners to do away from the screen.

What experience do you need to run a Code Club?

You don’t need to have any coding experience to run a club, as we provide a giant range of fun coding projects and support materials that can be easily followed by educators and young people alike. You just need to support and encourage your young coders, and you can get in touch with the Code Club team if you need any help!

The project paths we offer provide a framework for young coders to develop their skills, whatever their starting point is. Each path starts with three Explore projects, where coders learn new coding concepts and skills. The next two Design projects in the path help them practise these skills through creating fun games, animations, or websites. The final Invent project of the path gives a design brief, and based on this learners have the space to use their new skills and their creativity to code something based on their own ideas. 

Our project paths start with the basics of Scratch, and work through to creating websites in HTML and CSS, and to text-based coding in Python. For more advanced or adventurous coders, we also offer project paths to make physical projects with Raspberry Pi Pico, create 3D models in Blender, or even build 3D worlds in Unity.

Why is it important to teach coding to primary-aged children?

Lots of primary-aged children use digital technology every day, whether that be a TV, a phone, playing video games, or a computer at school. But they don’t have to be just consumers of technology. Through learning to code, young people become able to create their own technology, and our projects are designed to help them see how these new skills allow them to express themselves and solve problems that matter to them.

What young people do with their new skills is up to them – that’s the exciting part! Computing skills open paths to a wide range of projects and work where digital skills are helpful. And while learning coding is fun and useful, it also helps learners develop a many other important skills to do with problem solving, teamwork, and creativity.

Martin O’Hanlon heads the team that produces our free online courses programme. If you’re looking for continued professional development in computer science, look no further than to our more than 35 courses. (For teachers in England, a large number of the courses count towards the NCCE’s Primary, Secondary, or GCSE certificates.) Curated in 13 curated learning pathways, all of our courses provide high-quality training that you can take at home, at a time that suits you.

Martin, what can learners expect from taking one of our online courses?

Our online computing courses are free and have something for everyone who is interested in computing. We offer pathways for learning to program in Python or Scratch, teaching computing in the classroom, getting started with physical computing, and many more. 

We vary the materials and formats used in our courses, including videos, written articles, quizzes, and discussions to help learners get the most out of the experience. You will find a lot of practical activities and opportunities to practice what you learn. There are loads of opportunities to interact with and learn from others who are doing the course at the same time as you. And educators from the Raspberry Pi Foundation join the courses during facilitation periods to give their advice, support, and encouragement.

What is the idea behind the course pathways?

We have a large catalogue of online training courses, and the pathways give learners a starting point. They group the courses into useful collections, offering a recommended path for everyone, whether that’s people who are brand-new to computing or who have identified a gap in their existing computing skills or knowledge.

Our aim is that these pathways help people find the right course at the right point in their computing journey.

Thanks, everyone.

One more thing…

We’re also very excited to work on new research projects this school year, to help deepen the computing education community’s understanding of how to teach the subject in schools. Are you a primary teacher in England who is interested in making computing culturally relevant for your pupils?

We’re currently looking for teachers to take part in our research project around primary school culturally adapted resources, running from October 2022 to July 2023. Find out more about what taking part involves.

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The research team visited three schools in Germany to deliver Computing lessons based around the concept of a repair café, where defective items are repaired or restored rather than thrown away. This idea was translated into a series of lessons about using and repairing smartphones. Learners first of all explored the materials used in smartphones and reflected on their personal use of these devices. They then spent time moving around three repair workstations, examining broken smartphones and looking at how they could be repaired or repurposed. Finally, learners reflected on their own ecological footprint and what they had learnt about digital hardware and software.

An educational repair café

In the classroom, repair workstations were set up for three different categories of activity: fixing cable breaks, fixing display breaks, and tinkering to upcycle devices. Each workstation had a mentor to support learners in investigating faults themselves by using the question prompt, “Why isn’t this feature or device working?” At the display breaks and cable breaks workstations, a mentor was on hand to provide guidance with further questions about the hardware and software used to make the smartphone work. On the other hand, the tinkering workstation offered a more open-ended approach, asking learners to think about how a smartphone could be upcycled to be used for a different purpose, such as a bicycle computer. It was interesting to note that students visited each of the three workstations equally.

The feedback from the participants showed there had been a positive impact in prompting learners to think about the sustainability of their smartphone use. Working with items that were already broken also gave them confidence to explore how to repair the technology. This is a different type of experience from other Computing lessons, in which devices such as laptops or tablets are provided and are expected to be carefully looked after. The researchers also asked learners to complete a questionnaire two weeks after the lessons, and this showed that 10 of the 67 participants had gone on to repair another smartphone after taking part in the lessons.

Links to computing education

The project drew on a theory called duality reconstruction that has been developed by a researcher called Carsten Schulte. This theory argues that in computing education, it is equally important to teach learners about the function of a digital device as about the structure. For example, in the repair café lessons, learners discovered more about the role that smartphones play in society, as well as experimenting with broken smartphones to find out how they work. This brought a socio-technical perspective to the lessons that helped make the interaction between the technology and society more visible.

Using this approach in the Computing classroom may seem counter-intuitive when compared to the approach of splitting the curriculum into topics and teaching each topic sequentially. However, the findings from this project suggest that learners understand better how smartphones work when they also think about how they are manufactured and used. Including societal implications of computing can provide learners with useful contexts about how computing is used in real-world problem-solving, and can also help to increase learners’ motivation for studying the subject.

Working together

The final aspect of this research project looked at collaborative problem-solving. The lessons were structured to include time for group work and group discussion, to acknowledge and leverage the range of experiences among learners. At the workstations, learners formed small groups to carry out repairs. The paper doesn’t mention whether these groups were self-selecting or assigned, but the researchers did carry out observations of group behaviours in order to evaluate whether the collaboration was effective. In the findings, the ideal group size for the repair workstation activity was either two or three learners working together. The researchers noticed that in groups of four or more learners, at least one learner would become disinterested and disengaged. Some groups were also observed taking part in work that wasn’t related to the task, and although no further details are given about the nature of this, it is possible that the groups became distracted.

The findings from this project suggest that learners understand better how smartphones work when they also think about how they are manufactured and used.

Further investigation into effective pedagogies to set group size expectations and maintain task focus would be helpful to make sure the lessons met their learning objectives. This research was conducted as a case study in a small number of schools, and the results indicate that this approach may be more widely helpful. Details about the study can be found in the researchers’ paper (in German).

Repair café start-up tips

If you’re thinking about setting up a repair café in your school to promote sustainable computing, either as a formal or informal learning activity, here are ideas on where to begin:

• Connect with a network of repair cafés in your region; a great place to start is repaircafe.org
• Ask for volunteers from your local community to act as mentors
• Use video tutorials to learn about common faults and how to fix them
• Value upcycling as much as repair — both lead to more sustainable uses of digital devices
• Look for opportunities to solve problems in groups and promote teamwork

Discover more in Hello World

This article is from our free computing education magazine Hello World. Every issue is written by educators for educators and packed with resources, ideas, and insights to inspire your learners and your own classroom practice.

For more about computing education in the context of sustainability, climate change, and environmental impact, download issue 19 of Hello World, which focuses on these topics.

You can subscribe to Hello World for free to never miss a digital issue, and if you’re an educator in the UK, a print subscription will get you free print copies in the post.

PS If you’re interested in facilitating productive classroom discussions with your learners about ethical, legal, cultural, and environmental concerns surrounding computer science, take a look at our free online course ‘Impacts of Technology: How To Lead Classroom Discussions’.

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Machine learning: Accuracy and ethics

The landscape for working with machine learning/AI/deep learning has grown considerably over the last couple of years. Students are now able to develop their understanding from the hard-coded end via resources such as Machine Learning for Kids, get their hands dirty using relatively inexpensive hardware such as the Nvidia Jetson Nano, and build a classification machine using the Google-driven Teachable Machine resources. I have used all three of the above with my students, and this article focuses on Teachable Machine.

For this module, I’m more concerned with the fuzzy end of AI, including how credible AI decisions are, and the elephant-in-the-room aspect of bias and potential for harm.

Michael Jones

For the worried, there is absolutely no coding involved in this resource; the ‘machine’ behind the portal does the hard work for you. For my Year 9 classes (students aged 13 to 14) undertaking a short, three-week module, this was ideal. The coding is important, but was not my focus. For this module, I’m more concerned with the fuzzy end of AI, including how credible AI decisions are, and the elephant-in-the-room aspect of bias and potential for harm.

Getting started with Teachable Machine activities

There are three possible routes to use in Teachable Machine, and my focus is the ‘Image Project’, and within this, the ‘Standard image model’. From there, you are presented with a basic training scenario template — see Hello World issue 16 (pages 84–86) for a step-by-step set-up and training guide. For this part of the project, my students trained the machine to recognise different breeds of dog, with border collie, labrador, saluki, and so on as classes. Any AI system devoted to recognition requires a substantial set of training data. Fortunately, there are a number of freely available data sets online (for example, download a folder of dog photos separated by breed by accessing helloworld.cc/dogdata). Be warned, these can be large, consisting of thousands of images. If you have more time, you may want to set students off to collect data to upload using a camera (just be aware that this can present safeguarding considerations). This is a key learning point with your students and an opportunity to discuss the time it takes to gather such data, and variations in the data (for example, images of dogs from the front, side, or top).

Once you have downloaded your folders, upload the images to your Teachable Machine project. It is unlikely that you will be able to upload a whole subfolder at once — my students have found that the optimum number of images seems to be twelve. Remember to build this time for downloading and uploading into your lesson plan. This is a good opportunity to discuss the need for balance in the training data. Ask questions such as, “How likely would the model be to identify a saluki if the training set contained 10 salukis and 30 of the other dogs?” This is a left-field way of dropping the idea of bias into the exploration of AI — more on that later!

Accuracy issues in machine learning models

If you have got this far, the heavy lifting is complete and Google’s training engine will now do the work for you. Once you have set your model on its training, leave the system to complete its work — it takes seconds, even on large sets of data. Once it’s done, you should be ready to test you model. If all has gone well and a webcam is attached to your computer, the Output window will give a prediction of what is being viewed. Again, the article in Hello World issue 16 takes you through the exact steps of this process. Make sure you have several images ready to test. See Figure 1a for the response to an image of a saluki presented to the model. As you might expect, it is showing as a 100 percent prediction.

It will spark an interesting discussion if you now try the same operation with an image with items other than the one you’re testing in it. For example see Figure 1b, in which two people are in the image along with the Samoyed dog. The model is undecided, as the people are affecting the outcome. This raises the question of accuracy. Which features are being used to identify the dogs as border collie and saluki? Why are the humans in the image throwing the model off the scent?

Getting closer to home, training a model on human faces provides an opportunity to explore AI accuracy through the question of what might differentiate a female from a male face. You can find a model at helloworld.cc/maleorfemale that contains 5418 images almost evenly spread across male and female faces (see Figure 2). Note that this model will take a little longer to train.

Once trained, try the model out. Props really help — a top hat, wig, and beard give the model a testing time (pun intended). In this test (see Figure 3), I presented myself to the model face-on and, unsurprisingly, I came out as 100 percent male. However, adding a judge’s wig forces the model into a rethink, and a beard produces a variety of results, but leaves the model unsure. It might be reasonable to assume that our model uses hair length as a strong feature. Adding a top hat to the ensemble brings the model back to a 100 percent prediction that the image is of a male.

Machine learning uses a best-fit principle. The outputs, in this case whether I am male or female, have a greater certainty of male (65 percent) versus a lesser certainty of female (35 percent) if I wear a beard (Figure 3, second image from the right). Remove the beard and the likelihood of me being female increases by 2 percent (Figure 3, second image from the left).

Bias in machine learning models

Within a fairly small set of parameters, most human faces are similar. However, when you start digging, the research points to there being bias in AI (whether this is conscious or unconscious is a debate for another day!). You can exemplify this by firstly creating classes with labels such as ‘young smart’, ‘old smart’, ‘young not smart’, and ‘old not smart’. Select images that you think would fit the classes, and train them in Teachable Machine. You can then test the model by asking your students to find images they think fit each category. Run them against the model and ask students to debate whether the AI is acting fairly, and if not, why they think that is. Who is training these models? What images are they receiving? Similarly, you could create classes of images of known past criminals and heroes. Train the model before putting yourself in front of it. How far up the percentage scale are you towards being a criminal? It soon becomes frighteningly worrying that unless you are white and seemingly middle class, AI may prove problematic to you, from decisions on financial products such as mortgages through to mistaken arrest and identification.

It soon becomes frighteningly worrying that unless you are white and seemingly middle class, AI may prove problematic to you, from decisions on financial products such as mortgages through to mistaken arrest and identification.

Michael Jones

Encourage your students to discuss how they could influence this issue of race, class, and gender bias — for example, what rules would they use for identifying suitable images for a data set? There are some interesting articles on this issue that you can share with your students at helloworld.cc/aibias1 and helloworld.cc/aibias2.

Where next with your learners?

In the classroom, you could then follow the route of building models that identify letters for words, for example. One of my students built a model that could identify a range of spoons and forks. You may notice that Teachable Machine can also be run on Arduino boards, which adds an extra dimension. Why not get your students to create their own AI assistant that responds to commands? The possibilities are there to be explored. If you’re using webcams to collect photos yourself, why not create a system that will identify students? If you are lucky enough to have a set of identical twins in your class, that adds just a little more flavour! Teachable Machine offers a hands-on way to demonstrate the issues of AI accuracy and bias, and gives students a healthy opportunity for debate.

Michael Jones is director of Computer Science at Northfleet Technology College in the UK. He is a Specialist Leader of Education and a CS Champion for the National Centre for Computing Education.

More resources for AI and data science education

At the Foundation, AI education is one of our focus areas. Here is how we are supporting you and your learners in this area already:

• Hello World issue 12 focuses on AI and machine learning education, with many practical resources, insightful interviews, and inspiring features from computer science educators. Download your free copy of issue 12 now.
• In Hello World issue 16, the focus is on all things data science and data literacy for your learners. As always, you can download a free copy of the issue.
• On our Hello World podcast, we’ve got episodes where we talk with practicing computing educators about how they bring AI, AI ethics, machine learning, and data science to the young people they teach.
• Since we upgraded the Raspberry Pi–based hardware on board the International Space Station for the European Astro Pi Challenge, young people have better opportunities to use machine learning as part of the scientific experiments they write Python programs for during the Challenge. See what this teams taking part in this round of Astro Pi achieved and how you can get involved in mentoring students at your school to take part in the next round starting in September.
• If you’d like a practical introduction to the basics of machine learning and how to use it, take our free online course.

• Computing education researchers are working to answer the many open questions about what good AI and data science education looks like for young people. To learn more, you can watch the recordings from our research seminar series focused on this. We ourselves are working on research projects in this area and will share the results freely with the computing education community.
• You can find a list of free educational resources about these topics that we’ve collated based on our research seminars, seminar participants’ recommendations, and our own work.

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It was great to see the return of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Annual Conference to an in-person event this year, and I was really excited to be able to attend.

Our small Raspberry Pi Foundation team headed to Chicago for four and a half days of meetups, professional development, and conversations with educators from all across the US and around the world. Over the week our team ran workshops, delivered a keynote talk, gave away copies of Hello World magazine, and signed up many new subscribers. You too can subscribe to Hello World magazine for free at helloworld.cc/subscribe.

We spoke to so many educators about all parts of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work, with a particular focus on the Hello World magazine and podcast, and of course The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. In collaboration with CSTA, we were really proud to be able to provide all attendees with their own physical copy of this very special edition. 

It was genuinely exciting to see how pleased attendees were to receive their copy of The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. So many came to talk to us about how they’d used the digital copy already and their plans for using the book for training and development initiatives in their schools and districts. We gave away every last spare copy we had to teachers who wanted to share the book with their colleagues who couldn’t attend.

Don’t worry if you couldn’t make it to the conference, The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy is available as a free PDF, which due to its Creative Commons licence you are welcome to print for yourself.

Another goal for us at CSTA was to support and encourage new authors to the magazine in order to ensure that Hello World continues to be the magazine for computing educators, by computing educators. Anyone can propose an article idea for Hello World by completing this form. We’re confident that every computing educator out there has at least one story to tell, lessons or learnings to share, or perhaps a cautionary tale of something that failed.

We’ll review any and all ideas and will support you to craft your idea into a finished article. This is exactly what we began to do at the conference with our workshop for writers led by Gemma Coleman, our fantastic Hello World Editor. We’re really excited to see these ideas flourish into full-blown articles over the coming weeks and months.

Our week culminated in a keynote talk delivered by Sue, Jane, and James, exploring how we developed our 12 pedagogy principles that underpin The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, as well as much of the content we create at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. These principles are designed to describe a set of approaches that educators can add to their toolkit, giving them a shared language and the agency to select when and how they employ each approach. This was something we explored with teachers in our final breakout session where teachers applied these principles to describe a lesson or activity of their own.

We found the experience extremely valuable and relished the opportunity to talk about teaching and learning with educators and share our work. We are incredibly grateful to the entire CSTA team for organising a fantastic conference and inviting us to participate.

Discover more with Hello World — for free

Subscribe now to get each new Hello World straight to your digital inbox, for free! And if you’re based in the UK and do paid or unpaid work in education, you can subscribe for free print issues.

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