1. Scratch Community is a fantastic programming resource for learners of all ages. What better place to start than a site dedicated specifically to teachers who want to use Scratch to teach programming? Here you will find videos, lesson plans, worksheets, discussions and even real people to ask for help. Unfortunately the webinars (which are fantastic) are around 1.00 – 2.00 am UK time, but you can watch recordings afterwards.

2. Codecademy is the web resource that does exactly what it says on the tin. This is a good starting point to discover what computer programming (in JavaScript) can be like. Sometimes unforgiving if you get your syntax wrong. (that’s spelling, punctuation and grammar in computer speak) You get feedback as you progress and learners can compare their score with each other.

3. Invent With Python is a real book that teaches you step by step how to program using the Python programming language. The book is available as a hard copy to purchase, a free download or just view it online for free. The author has a friendly style of writing and explains all the code used clearly. Don’t worry – no references to large snakes.

4. Computing At School is a free-to-join association for anyone with an interest in computing in education. Sponsors include Microsoft and Google among others. Benefits of joining – free-to-attend annual conference, regional hub meetings, competitions, newsletters and teachshares. Meet up with lots of other like minded people to share and steal good practice.

5. Twitter is another great place to hang out with like minded people who wish to promote computing science in education, try following some of these people and read what they are doing. You will find they rarely tweet about what they have had for breakfast, or what colour socks they are wearing, instead they have good quality education based tweets @largerama, @drtomcrick, @codeboom, @hubmum, @batteredbluebox, @CompAtSch, @GuardianTeach oh and @teknoteacher (that’s me!)

6. Code Hero is a totally new way to learn how to code. It’s a first-person science shooter game where you use the code gun to manipulate code. You learn how to code in order to succeed in the game.

7. Play My Code is “an online platform for building, playing and distributing browser games. Powered by HTML5, you can build within the browser and embed your games anywhere.” Start by simply playing the games, then make small alterations to make the games easier or more difficult to play, share your altered games with friends. Before you know it you are a games developer.

8. The 2008 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were given by Professor Chris Bishop on the power of computing. The videos are now available to watch on the big screen in your classroom also available as a free DVD from here. Suitable viewing from around age 8 upwards.

9. The National Museum of Computing and MOSI are two great museums to explore for teachers planning to teach the development of computers. Book yourself out of school to visit as part of your CPD or take your family. Create your own videos or record interviews while you are there.

10. iTunes contains many podcasts and academic programs (iTunesU) that you can follow. On your ipod, you can catch up with the world of computing science, technology and more while travelling in the car, bus or tube. Try some of these GuardianTechWeekly, BBC Click, Introduction to C# Programming

To promote the subject of Computing in school, I’ve recorded a rap. The plan is to make a video that accompanies it and post it to YouTube. You can listen to it here, or download from iTunes.

Somebody asked me for a transcript of the words – here it is…

Hack Rap

brothers & sisters, problem sweepin our nation

10000 vacancies a year, no exageration

listen to me rap now, jus need to be patient

all these jobs available in digital creation

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

Be successful, with an A* GCSE

Listen, I’m spittin I’m your rebel MC

The next farmville or modern warfare 3?

Programming computers not the same as ICT

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

an if you wonderin what my campaign is

don’ matter how big dat your brain is

get you programmin s’what my aim is

gonna make you all famous in the game biz

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

You know I’m in the business of education

I want you to learn all about computation

It’s not a Microsoft powerpoint qualification

I offer you inspiration, motivation, dedication

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

Come and posse up with the rest of ma crew

they call me aod or mr o’donahue

we all share in common the same point of view

I gotta very special message to get to you

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

You dont have to be techie, nerd or a geek

It’s not just science & maths buffs that we seek

You’ll coding applications every week

To develop your programming technique

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

Hey dont make fun of me cos I got no hair

Be nice to me and you’ll get to build your own hardware

Make big bucks from your selling your software

making apps like tumbler twitter foursquare

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

I thought this was the best way to reach you

There’s so many cool things I wanna teach you

learn what really happens inside a Computer

If you want to know more I wanna meet you

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

There’s a shortage of programmers in the UK

Software developers can earn really high pay

Get a job with Facebook, Google or eBay

Or learn to code all the kinds of games that you play

Computing it’s takin over the world

not just for men, but all you women and girls

not just looking for geeks or nerds

we’ll make you more famous than the angry birds

If you venture into the Waterstones store and visit the ‘Computing’ section, you maybe lucky enough to find one real computing book as I did. So – do we accept the situation as it is, or do we persuade these high street book sellers to either rename the ‘Computing’ section to ‘ICT’ or to stock more books on programming, hardware, and computing science.

Then, a few weeks later a message from Keri Facer at Manchester Metropolitan Uni attracted an enormous response with over 2800 visits to that one blog post alone.

So, you can imagine how delighted I was to receive a phone call last week from the BBC asking if they could bring their coding platform along to our Hack To The Future event on Saturday 11th February. This event is aimed at an audience of children aged 11-18 years old. Below is an official statement from the BBC Learning Innovations department that explains a little more about their intentions.

“The BBC will be participating in and running a series of events, activities and projects throughout 2012 to bring people and organizations together who share our enthusiasm for improving engagement with computer science for everyone.

At Hack to the Future we would like to invite young people to use our proto-type coding platform, for the first time, to create their own web server or hack a phone or control hardware kit. More details to follow.”  

My humble response to the Guardian article.

This week, I discovered how many of our Year 9 pupils (14&15 yr olds) have chosen to study GCSE Computing (not ICT) next year at GCSE.

Last year 15 boys and no girls chose to study GCSE Computing.

This year 17 boys and 3 girls have chosen to study GCSE Computing.

I don’t know whether I should be happy that finally some girls have opted to choose Computing or disappointed that more did not choose it. I’ve have been trying hard (difficult perhaps being a man) to persuade girls to consider themselves as being just as good, if not better than boys at this.

Some things I tried were the hack rap “Computing..not just for men, but all you women and girls” http://audioboo.fm/boos/607041-hack-rap

We have an encouraging amount of girls coming to our Hack To The Future event next month. http://h2df.eventbrite.co.uk/?ebtv=F

Recently in my lessons at school, I have tried to focus more on the responses from girls to computing science related activities in class. It is my perception that girls in Year 7 & 8 are generally more receptive to seeing themselves as capable as boys in these activities, more so than older girls. I found this video and thought it might help change some impressions.

Why Computing Science?

Later that day I listened to Bill Thompson quote the writer William Gibson,

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”

Earlier this year, I decided that we were going to introduce computing science or computational thinking to all children in our school. Over the Summer Holidays I studied crash courses in Java, Visual Basic, C#. It was only when I landed on Python that I felt my journey to find a suitable language to teach computer science had reached the first stop on the journey.

So, for the last few weeks, I have tried a few different variations with my guinea pigs in Year 7, 8, 9 and 10. I thought my toughest challenge would be a low – mid range ability class in Year 7. IN these next two audioboos, I share some of my thoughts and experiences. If you search further back in my blog, you will find some interviews with a range of pupils and see some lessons on YouTube that I recorded where the children taught the rest of the class some computational concepts. I have now made my audioboos available iTunes as well so if you have a suitable device you can automatically download the latest episodes for listening on the train, bus, car etc.

I do really hope that after listening to these ‘boos you will try doing something similar with your own children or classes and let me know of your own experiences. We will soon be rolling this out to other classes in school and would like to chare this with you.

and

We will be offering a free evening course at our school on Thursday 1st March 4.00 – 5.30pm for any teachers who are interested in learning how to teach Python or want to come along and watch, observe.  http://caspreston.eventbrite.com/

You can download these to your mp3 player here, available here in iTunes or visit my Audioboo page.

I call it a micro-podcast, because each episode is less than 5 minutes. They are all recorded in one take on my smartphone using Audioboo, with no editing afterwards – so rough and ready. However, I hope that they will prove useful to someone. If they are useful to you, or you have some suggestions to make about the way in which I do this – please email me ALANaattODONOHOEddotORGdddooottUK, comment here on the blog or tweet me @teknoteacher.

The first activity to engage their interest was to allow them to interrogate Collette Curry‘s chatbot called ‘Chaturing‘. The children certainly enjoyed the activity and many of them found it difficult to tear themselves away from it. In fact, later in the lesson I discovered that they kept returning to it when they thought I was not watching them.

In this first audioboo I ask the children what they thought about the chatbot, the questions they asked and what reponses they received.

In the next activity I introduced the class to the Python interactive shell (IDLE) and demonstrated evaluating some simple expressions. Then in a new window, the class all typed in a simple ‘Hello World’ program then taking care to save the file appropriately with the .py extension on the end.

Once the class had created a simple program that asked them their name using myName = () and then returned the function print(‘Hello ‘+myName) . Many pupils then repeated this form of print, input, print to improve their prgram and add apprarent arificial elements to their program. I used Al Sweigart’s book ‘Invent With Python’ to base my lesson around.

The questions that many of the children subsequently added to their code were in the order of What’s you favourite hair colour.

At the end of the lesson I asked some pupils about the good and bad points of the lesson.

Just yesterday, I released the first batch of tickets to children on this site here. For a number of reasons, I have had to create a separate event page for the children to sign up on. If you would like to bring some 11 – 18 year olds to this event, please sign up now. Although the event is described as North West – everyone from around the UK is welcome to attend. If you are interested in speaking or volunteering, please sign up on a separate site here.

One thing I am particulary keen to promote is the role of girls in computing. It can be a struggle to persuade girls 12+ that this is something they should be looking at. In the last couple of days I recorded interviews with two groups of girls and got different responses.I will continue some more of these – if you have questions you would like me to ask, let me know.