Digital Citizenship

Practice Your Programming At Home!

Computer programming or ‘coding’ is now a huge part of the Primary and Secondary computing curricula, and for very good reason!  It is an absolutely fantastic subject for fostering a wide range of vital transferrable skills including problem solving, reasoning, resilience, creativity, self-regulation and thinking outside of the box, not to mention the extremely useful cross-over with maths. Thinking to the future, computer programming and software games design is also one of the fastest growing global industries and most lucrative employment opportunities, and this certainly shows no sign of slowing down. Above all it is immensely fun, can be done on your own or collaboratively and doesn’t require any expensive apps… just a device with an internet connection. If your child is keen to get stuck into some extra programming and coding at home, please take a look at the suggestions below.

Pre-prep
For the younger children there several brilliant apps to try, all of which are free!
Daisy the  Dinosaur
KS2
The hands-down best option for KS2 children is the Scratch website, which is free and just requires a parent’s email address to create an account. It has a lot of fantastic tutorials and ready made projects, as well as the chance to ‘look inside’ and tinker with all of the existing projects on there. https://scratch.mit.edu/
 
A couple of other great options include the https://code.org/ website, and if you have an iPad, the Swift Playgrounds app https://www.apple.com/uk/swift/playgrounds/

If you have any questions or would like a guide to any of these, please do get in touch.

Happy coding! 

Mark Adkins
Head of Digital Learning