Learn with your child - computing

Why teach computing? The National Curriculum states: A high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world. Computing has deep links with mathematics, science, and design and technology, and provides insights into both natural and artificial systems. The core of computing is computer science, in which pupils are taught the principles of information and computation, how digital systems work, and how to put this knowledge to use through programming. Building on this knowledge and understanding, pupils are equipped to use information technology to create programs, systems and a range of content. Computing also ensures that pupils become digitally literate – able to use, and express themselves and develop their ideas through, information and communication technology – at a level suitable for the future workplace and as active participants in a digital world.

Our aims at Chawson are that all children: understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems are responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.

Now, we appreciate that a lot of the language in the National Curriculum, and that the children are expected to learn, can be quite confusing to us! Don’t panic, here are the definitions of the most common terms used in good old plain English!!

E-safety is an integral part of the National Curriculum and one that we aim to embed throughout our teaching of computing. We live in a world where we are surrounded by technology and we as parents and teachers have a duty to ensure that our children are safe and have the knowledge to know how to keep themselves safe in the future. The following clip may seem irrelevant at first to your children, but as we all know too well, children grow up quickly and we need to ensure that we support and equip them to stay safe whilst online. The clip is quite hard hitting and by no means would it be something that we share with your children – it is actually aimed at year olds but is definitely worth a watch. J22M

Parents-Conversation-Starters-SID16.pdf What to do now?

Thank you for giving us your time this morning, we hope that you have found it informative and will now enjoy learning with your child in a computing lesson. Enjoy and have fun!