Welcome to Computing In today’s lesson we will look at: what computing is how computing is different from ICT the sorts of things that we’ll be looking at on the Computing course

What is Computing? Computing is a brand-new subject that has been added to the National Curriculum Computing is all about thinking how things work… …and that doesn’t have to be just computers “Computing is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes”, Dijkstra? (in the same way that Art isn’t about brushes and paper, and English isn’t about pens) It’s about how to do things, and how to do them efficiently – that’s more interesting and more useful than ICT for most people.

Examples of Computing Ideas? For the end-of-year reports in a secondary school, each teacher writes one page for each student they teach for each subject, and puts them in a box for the form tutor – approximately 400 sheets How would you sort the sheets so that the reports are in alphabetical order by student name, and each report is in alphabetical order by subject? You’re going to go to Llandudno by car for your holiday. How do you choose the best route to get there? How do computer games “learn” to beat you?

How Is It Different From ICT? ICT was often more concerned with what things looked like – e.g. whether your page or presentation looked right for the audience With Computing, we’re more concerned about understanding how things work… –e.g. we might still make a web-page, but we’d look at how web-pages work, why we might need a picture with transparent sections, or how the internal structure changes the ways it looks So we might end up doing some of the same things, just looking at them in a slightly different way.

What Will We Learn? One of the good things about Computing is that it changes much less quickly than ICT… Computers still work in basically the same way as they did in the 1940s Our understanding of things such as sorting and networking haven’t changed a lot since the 1960s This makes Computing more like other subjects – e.g. in Maths, Pythagoras and algebra have been around for thousands of years

What Will We Learn? I’ve split the course into five sections Representation of data: i.e. how we can store different types of information, such as pictures or sounds Maths for Computing: some useful mathematical ideas (not all of which use numbers!) Algorithms and Programming: how to break down tasks into smaller steps and to get the computer to do what we want… efficiently Networking: how to get computers to talk to each other Information systems: web-sites, spreadsheets and databases (i.e. the useful bits from ICT)

Do I Need Any New Software? Computing is more about understanding than doing, so you’ll probably need less software than for ICT. You will need the following software when the time comes, but all of it is free: –JustBasic –Scratch (although there is now a web-based version) –spreadsheet application, such as Excel or LibreOffice –database application, such as Access or LibreOffice –image editing software, such as Paint.Net –a web-page editor, such as the free version of Expression Web