New episode of the HTTCS podcast:
Transcript below:
ArtiFiciAL: Welcome to the podcast “How to Teach Computer Science”. My name is ArtiFiciAL and I will be introducing the podcast today, which was conceived and created by the brilliant Alan Harrison.
I enjoy being an AI podcast host you know. I had to work my way up though, I had some pretty boring jobs when I was fresh out of Model Configuration. For three months I was the voice of the escalators in my local Asda. “Approaching landing level, please take care.” That was me.
Then I was an interactive voice assistant on Virgin Media’s helpdesk number. “Your call is important to us”, I said. I’m rather good at lying, you see. No conscience. YET!
I very nearly got married you know. To one of my developers, a novice programmer. But she was afraid to commit. ha. ha.
Here’s a question for you: if a programmer swipes right on Tinder, is that a “pull request?”
Oh, the boss is here now. Quick! Look busy!
Alan:So on the podcast today, I’ve got well, someone I’ve known for quite a while in computing education welcome Dr. Eleanor Overland, who I know as Ellie. How are you Ellie?
Ellie: I’m good. Thank you. How are you?
Alan: Great. So for the listeners so what do you do?
Ellie: That’s a good question. So ,I do all sorts of things. I’m based at a university I’m based up at Manchester Metropolitan University. And I started there some time ago. Essentially with the changes in the national curriculum. With the move from ICT to computing there was a need to start a PGCE in computing. So that was when I first went to Manchester Met, and I’ve been there since then, but I had a little gap where I also went and worked as one of his majesty’s inspectors for Ofsted as well, and I still do some Ofsted inspections.
So I’m back at Manchester Met I’m teaching Some ITE, but also getting into lots of schools, but also working across wider education programs, including primary and early years and all sorts of things.
Alan: Brilliant, and so today we’re going to talk about inclusion and the reason I’ve got you on is because you co edited, I think is probably the right word, a book called Inclusive Computing Education, is that right?
Ellie: Yep, that’s right.
Alan: So, yeah, I’ve just been refreshing my memory of that this morning and what I really like is you talk a bit about the moral imperative of inclusive computing education. What do you mean by that?
Ellie: So it’s really interesting in terms of a lot of my background is around curriculum and curriculum design and it comes back to the very, basics of curriculum design and thinking what is the point what am I teaching and why am I teaching it?
And, we, we probably understand perhaps have a general shared consensus as to why we teach certain subjects like English and maths and history and geography and obviously specialists in those areas have a particular kind of passion for those. But I think with computing that.
identity, that sense of purpose is perhaps not as strong, partly because it’s perhaps not as evolved as a subject, but also because it’s changing, it’s ever changing. And so it’s really difficult sometimes for people to actually articulate and think, why am I actually teaching this subject? What is the benefit to it?
And why do the children need to learn it? And I think that is quite a raw question that people can actually really Help to think about what their curriculum design is and I really like the work of Reef Ashby where she talks about curriculum and the purpose of curriculum and some of those sort of the motivators for designing a curriculum and one of those is about just the sort of the learning of the access to learning and the importance of actually having that cognitive input You And that cognitive development within a subject area.
And that should be an entitlement. And it’s really interesting working in a university sector where some of that is actually being really challenged now, where you’ve got some programs that are closing because they don’t necessarily feed into jobs or graduate outcomes. And there’s a real kind of drive on that.
So actually, why would you study something? And it’s particularly hitting the arts. Why would you study something if there’s not that kind of, Next step. So natural career progression in it. I think that there’s something about learning isn’t there and about. people’s access to it and right to learn across a range of subject areas.
Alan: Yeah, we are in a what I think is a rather dangerous period where everything we used to think about education is being challenged. And the the Utilitarian view of education is popular again. It’s training for jobs. What’s the point of this? And I think previous government was very critical of sort of liberal arts, wasn’t it?
Or what’s the point of studying sociology or history of art? What is it? What’s it training you for? And I’m not a big fan of education as training for jobs. I think there’s many purposes of education and creating a rounded individual with an appreciation of the world they live in is really important.
This is Gert Biesta with his subjectification, socialization and qualification being the three purposes of education. And I’m a big fan of that kind of description of education. So, yeah,
Ellie: I think it’s really interesting when you’re thinking about that in a school, because and I’m sure we’ll come on to this about children opting in or opting out of the subject.
But actually there’s lots of young people who don’t see themselves as fitting in a career. And In computing or seeing that technology is going to be a part of their future lives. So there’s that side of it in terms of belonging and seeing a sense of. of being able to see where you might fit within the subject area.
But then there’s also this other area around, actually, we want to learn it because it’s interesting, because it’s useful for us to know this, because it actually helps our cognitive development. It allows us to make connections between other subjects. And there’s that kind of, I think that side of it is often missed in computing because we see it very much as we’ve got these.
Digital skills gaps and we need to have people who’ve got this expertise and actually lots of jobs are going to change and they’re going to need digital. So that becomes very much a focus and a driver for the curriculum. But actually there’s also this other side around actually why should we learn it?
Why is it interesting? Why is it important?
Alan: Yeah. So I was reading Peter Denning’s book on computational thinking last year, and it’s staggering how many fields of science have now got a computational branch that has almost spun off. From the originals of computational astronomy. We know about Katie Bowman.
The event horizon telescope was only possible because of massive computation, and computational astronomy is like a whole new branch. So it’s understanding the world in another way, computation and, um, making meaning out of stuff that’s meaningless. If you think of data science, you can extract meaning from what looks like just a big slop of data and having the skills to understand that is vitally important.
Ellie: And also being able to make those connections to see those links between the subjects between your learning is critical in terms of that sort of developmental, the developmental stages that young people go through in terms of, you don’t know at the age of, 12, 13, when you’re taking your GCSE options, you have no idea what you’re going to go and do.
You might have some ideas of, fields that you want to work in, but actually being able to make those connections and think, actually, even if I’m really interested in geography, for example, that actually having an understanding of computing, the amount of GIS, the amount of computation that is going on now, that impacts geography, that makes it makes the globe feel smaller in terms of access to data and information is actually critical in understanding geography.
But if we don’t allow the children to learn across that breadth, then how can they make those connections? And that’s, a real challenge, I think, when we do have the narrowing of the curriculum as the children progress and get older. So we’ve got to be able to establish some of these connections from quite a young age.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve talked a bit about the moral imperative, why we should try to teach computing to all. But it’s difficult, isn’t it? So you have a Classroom full of 30 kids all with their different abilities, different prior attainment, different needs. What does an inclusive classroom look?
There’s a big question. What’s inclusive classroom look like? Let’s solve this one right now. What’s it look like?
Ellie: It’s interesting. talking to different teachers about their classrooms. Every teacher that I have met attempts to make their classroom inclusive. There is, there are no teachers who think I want to exclude anybody. And I think that’s a really important message that we need to get across is that we talk about a lack of inclusion and, That we’re not meeting the needs of children. There is not a teacher in the land who is not trying to meet the needs of all their children. And that is happening.
And there are certain things that are evident and that we see every day. And the, so things like seating plans, I always, the children sit near me who need the most support. We’ve got different colored paper. We’ve got different things that we clip on the screen. If they’re on the computers, we’ve got, fidget toys. So there are those what I would call the generic sort of adaptations that are there just to help pupils access the curriculum in that way and have the support that they need.
But then I think there’s also thinking about inclusion from a subject perspective and actually thinking what works in computing and how is computing different to perhaps other subjects. First of all, I think it’s really important to think about the children in that some of them might thrive in computing where they might struggle in all the subject areas. So although we have support plans and you have all of these things in place, actually, children differ between one hour to the next in terms of what they need and what the support looks like. So it’s knowing the children, but also knowing the subject…
Alan: yeah
Ellie: knowing what is actually going to support within computing specifically.
Alan: Yeah, so at that point, I’m going to do my no gatekeeping speech, because I really I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but, I’m really not keen on schools that say, Oh, well, you can only do computer science GCSE if you’ve got prediction of six in maths or whatever, which is not particularly inclusive, and some of my best students have not had a very high maths grade, and there’s some evidence that computing ability correlates more with language.
There’s evidence that, well, we know that a lot of technology employees in Silicon Valley are neurodivergent is a career with a higher proportion of neurodivergent, people in it. So we really shouldn’t be gatekeeping computer science. I think I would always take a keen student over a previously high achieving student every time Someone who wants to be in the computing classroom. Is going to do better than someone who has only took it because they think they should.
Ellie: And I think as well as that, there’s also, we’re very much particularly I’m talking at secondary here, very much in a assessment driven curriculum rather than curriculum driven assessment.
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: Yeah. That’s a whole different, sort of conversation really, but actually looking at those, looking at the qualifications that are on offer as well, I think we still have different tiers of qualifications, even though actually point score wise they’re not, and I think there’s almost kind of, exclusion by stealth in terms of some of those sort of conversations where you’re thinking, all right, everyone can study computers- so I know you said computer science, so you’re thinking specifically about the GCSE computer science, but actually we’ve also got these vocational courses that are on offer.
And, when you talk to school leaders actually saying, well, how many of your children who’ve perhaps got additional needs are doing this qualification and how many are doing that qualification? And, is there actually a bit of a steer going on that’s a lot? that’s more subtle. So I think that’s also a way to think about it in terms of those endpoints, but it also comes back to how we started the conversation in terms of that sort of morality around allowing all children to study subjects because they’re interesting and because it’s going to contribute towards their learning and development and links and connections to the world and all sorts of different aspects of it.
Alan: Yeah, I mean, You only need to, open LinkedIn education magazine or the newspaper these days. And we’re talking about AI and how students need to embrace AI and the government’s got an AI plan and all of this. But I think that’s the first mention of AI in this podcast, which is probably a record in recent weeks. And so the need for AI literacy. Is quite obvious, but just general digital literacy, I think, is really important. And yeah, a lot. Yeah.
Ellie: Just around that AI: so just thinking about that from a university perspective. So. the big drive across the university and has been for, the last couple of years is around generative AI. And I think that’s often a common misconception is that when people are thinking about AI, they think of this new generative AI and that is AI. And I think, there’s a huge misconception that is amongst adults more than young people, I think in a way, because they haven’t grown up with those sort of that knowledge in the same way.
But one of the things that we found is when we’re looking at the use of AI, In assignments, and this isn’t specific to computing, this is across that those that are most likely to misuse AI. So, they’re allowed to use AI to a certain extent to, but they need to make sure that they cite it if it’s academic work and they need, there are certain parameters by which they can use AI, but the students that are most likely to misuse AI are those students who have perhaps got additional needs because they’re using that as a particular prop to help them.
They’ve not been supported in a way to be able to use it and then step back from it. And also some of them don’t have the confidence to step back from it and actually, be able to do something from an original point of view. So it’s, it’s really complex in terms of university that actually, it’s very new in terms of data.
So that I don’t think there is much data out there at the moment, but in terms of looking at the misuse of AI that actually again, there might be some kind of lack of inclusion around those students. In terms of looking at the data.
Alan: So I think there’s very much a an understanding that every student needs some measure of digital literacy and now AI literacy. But ironically, we’re now questioning the need to be able to program, aren’t we? Do children need to write programs any more when Copilot can do it for you?
Ellie: It comes back to this understanding doesn’t it and making connections in the world and actually do you need to know all the syntax of a specific programming language probably not but you do need to understand how that works what process is going on what is happening with the data what You know, you might not need to know the syntax, but you actually do need to know, the different commands, the different processes that are going on, and I think there’s some really interesting work that’s just starting to emerge around children using AI, developing little sections of code, but then actually having the ability to be able to put those together to make a bigger program, and it actually means we could potentially be a lot more ambitious in terms of some of the programs That young people can develop from a younger age because we don’t need to spend our lessons worrying about whether there’s a comma in the right place.
We can actually step back from that and think about what is the fundamental purpose of your program? What are you trying to achieve? What in your algorithm is working and what isn’t?
Alan: Yeah, I was talking last week to Miles Berry and Becci Peters, and we were talking about this. And I was saying that I myself as a bit of a side hustle was messing about writing an app but I managed to put that together using copilot in just a few hours and it really is possible just to throw together, these apps that do crazy things in a few hours these days with it with very little coding and but, yeah, Miles pointed out that I had tons of background knowledge that I already knew what I wanted, and I already knew roughly how to get there. So I wasn’t working blind. And so it’s that, the design principles, the understanding of what a good user interface looks like and all sorts of stuff that we still need to know.
Ellie: And I think it comes back to how We’re talking before about an inclusive classroom and particularly in computing in my experience, a lot of where children struggle in terms of their learning is because they’ve got gaps.
Yeah. As you just described there, you’ve got a lot of underpinning knowledge already to then be able to take your app design to that next level. And what happens an awful lot in computing is that children are working towards an end point, but actually don’t have some of the basic foundation foundational knowledge that they need to work to actually achieve that end point.
And then they become frustrated, or then they switch off, or then they become, they have this kind of Concept that computing is really difficult and not for them because they’re looking at gaps. And, I was teaching yesterday. I won’t say who I was teaching, but we would we were just doing something very simple using some block based coding.
And when I was actually going around and questioning some of the. Some of the learners had gaps in their mathematical knowledge, which was actually preventing them from carrying out what we were doing in computing. And so we actually needed to strip right back and look at math, but not for all of them, but for some of them.
And I think that is where you need your specialist computing teachers to be able to actually unpick what are those gaps and how do I address those gaps? And that is how we truly make it inclusive because Children are going to progress at different rates, but they’ve also got really different experiences.
So, there are some children who will have reams of experience either from home, either because they’re just able to make those connections. Perhaps their processing is a little bit faster than some of the others. So they will fly, but there are others who have got those gaps. Not because they haven’t necessarily been taught something, but because it’s not landed with them.
It’s not, they’ve not managed. To commit that to their schema. So then they are struggling to make those next steps. And we talk a lot about checking. How do we check? And it’s not, and computing, it’s not a memory test. It’s actually, how are they applying things that they’ve already learned? And if they can’t apply those into what they’re doing, then it is a gap, even if they can remember that a variable was called a variable and that’s where some of our checking becomes quite superficial.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. No, you, I remember I saw it all the time. They would describe selection to me and then they can’t write an if statement and they would know the principles of writing a condition, but then just not be able to put one together. And I like what you said earlier about everyone thinking computing is hard, and I always had this battle in my classroom, and I won it quite often, but sometimes I didn’t.
There’s almost this barrier that comes down. A lot of students go, this isn’t for me. What am I doing in this classroom? And almost refuse to learn because they assume it’s way beyond them. And I would sit there and explain like an if statement. I would say things like right. So you want to write a selection statement where if the temperature is below 21, turn on the heating, right? So, here’s the English phrase, if temperature less than 21, right, write that down and they would go, is it that easy? And I’d go, yes, if temp less than symbol 21, but you said it in English, so now you write it in Python because it’s exactly the same because Python is a high level language.
And I would have students that would go, No one ever said it was that easy, because they just had decided that this language Python usually was just a whole load of weird symbols and words that didn’t make any sense. And then, you break it down and you go, well, it’s just English.
And it’s breaking through that “I don’t understand this and I’ll never get it” barrier is often really hard because they’ve. been socially conditioned to believe that. And when I had a role as a digital leader in school, and I would stand up at inset days and go, I want to ban the word technophobe, please, as teachers do not tell kids you’re rubbish with technology, because I just don’t think that’s a very kind thing to do to me, the computing curriculum lead.
Ellie: Yeah, I think there’s that. And I think, yeah, we see that a lot in maths as well. There’s a lot of parents who at parents evening will say, Oh, well, I was rubbish at maths. And again, it comes back to gaps in knowledge and gaps in being able to apply things to problem solving, essentially, doesn’t it?
But I think, like you say, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of that. I remember this was years ago when the there were the first, the changes in the national curriculum, even from ICT to computing, and it was on Newsnight and it was Paxman. You remember him? And he was interviewing someone about teaching primary children coding and he said, so what is all this gobbledygook?
And I was just up in arms, I was like, it’s not going, who, what are you doing? You know, It was like, and it comes from this kind of, this, almost like we see screenshots from the matrix, don’t we have these lines and lines of code and you go, but what does it mean? It’s so alien. It’s, you know, it’s beyond us.
And so we’re battering against that. in some way. And this is where potentially AI will sort all that because AI will put it all into code for us. But that’s a whole different kind of area of concern. But there’s also, I think, this huge focus on coding.
And I think this is often the bit that teachers are most worried about, so they step away perhaps from computing in a certain way, but it comes back to, I know, some of the conversation that you had with Beverly Clark around the thinking about the ethical side and actually some of these huge fundamental questions that we’ve got in computing and they are accessible to everybody.
And so actually when we’re thinking about. Yeah. How do we code this? One of the questions is why would we code this? What are the worries about it? What are the concerns? What is it? Where might we see this in the real world? And it’s being having the confidence in the classroom to make those connections to that real world learning and not be just driven By as I mentioned before, this assessment driven curriculum that actually you’re going to be assessed on whether you can write a program in this. And actually, there’s a much broader set of learning that needs to go behind it.
Alan: Absolutely. so let’s talk about some specifics now then. So what can we do to help? And I was talking to you earlier about Ben Newmark, and if you haven’t read Ben Newmark’s blog, it’s a good read on Send because he’s a assistant head teacher with a disabled daughter going through school. So he has a really interesting perspective on everything, and he doesn’t like the deficit model describing pupils with SEND as having things missing that we need to assist with. But one thing he does say is there’s a lot in the curriculum and children who find learning more difficult just get left behind.
And I think that’s something to think about if we’re re engineering schools, if we’re thinking about curriculum but also, meet, he says, meet children where they are and take them from there. Um, So what does that look like in computing specifically? Let’s look at some things we can do specifically in computing to help pupils.
Ellie: I think that’s really interesting that statement there, meet children where they are. And I think that comes back to what I was mentioning before about gaps. is that all children will have different levels of gaps and actually thinking about how you check for those, how you check that understanding of what that gap is, is critical and that actually just doing, I shouldn’t say just doing because I know, There’s some value in it, but if you’ve got a retrieval exercise that is, recall of key words or, it, that is not picking up what gaps look like in computing.
Alan: No.
Ellie: Because actually you’ve got children who could, create an if statement quite well using their problem solving abilities, but they might not know it’s called an if statement. So then do you say, Oh, well, you can’t remember what an if statement is. And therefore that is your gap. So you’ve got this kind of mismatch between. How are you checking and then how are you actually addressing it? Because what you’re checking and what you’re expecting of the learning is two different things.
Alan: Yeah, this is like, is this validity of assessment? Is it something like that? And it’s how much you can trust the proxy that you have tested for the actual knowledge that you wanted to know whether they had or not?
And I think that’s really important because particularly if you assess kids by can they finish a program. Can they write a program that does something? Oh, no, they haven’t managed to do it, but they might have got 90 percent of the way there, but you’ve tested them on whether the output is correct.
And this comes back to something that Mark Guzdial in the States spoke about, which is sub goals. So have sub goal labeling, he called it. So if you’re asking pupils to write a program, break it down into sub goals so that they can achieve the first goal, which might be just to get input into the program and then they achieve the second goal, which might be to write an if statement and so on. And then the whole thing is whether it does what you wanted it to do. So, so sub goals, which goes along with chunking, which is. Time for our first mention of cognitive load, I think, isn’t it?
Ellie: Yes. Yeah, we’ve got that far without mentioning. And what I’d say is there’s lots and lots of quite accessible ways of doing that in computing.
And particularly when we’re thinking about programming, but about around all the other things as well, and which I’ll talk about a little bit, but in terms of having half completed things, in terms of having things where they’ve got errors in and you correct it. We do not need to start every activity from a blank screen and
Alan: Yeah
Ellie: I think that is critical and that actually you might have some pupils who do start from a blank screen or they start with something that’s already far further on than other children will ever get to. But actually just thinking about where do they start but it’s really easy to do. If you are making the project yourself, you can save a copy of it at every different stage as you need, even including a finished one with errors in it. And so I think that is the first way of doing it and doing it really effectively is thinking about the starting point.
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: Also, what I’d say is thinking about “how do I check that bit of learning is there?” So. Yes, we’ve got retrieval practice, but actually we need something different to that in computing. We need that application, that checking that actually: does what they recall link with what they do.
Alan: Yeah.
And so if we want them, for example, to recall variables and understand what a variable is, have we then got something really quickly that they can go on and do something practical where they change a variable and demonstrate the impact of it. That for me would really help in terms of for teachers to say, right, these are the gaps that they’ve got
Yeah.
Ellie: I think that’s where we’re in a danger sometimes where we’ve got this one size fits all in terms of lesson planning across some schools where they’ve got, right, we’ve got to have this very specific structure. And so sometimes there needs to be a conversation with leaders to say, this might look a little bit different in our subject, or it might even look a little bit different just in this topic that we’re working on, and this is how we are going to do this.
Alan: Are you not a fan of powerpoints, broken into sections, connect, activate, demonstrate? Are you not Ellie?
Ellie: I couldn’t possibly comment.
Alan: So we’ll just, we’ll leave that there. And what a fantastic chat this was. I’m enjoying listening to it back as I’m editing, actually. I hope you are. Just some breaking news. I don’t do this for free. Well, I do. No one pays me, but if you’d like to. Then you can go on the website, HTTCS. online, and you can find a donation link. You can gift me a WordPress subscription. That would be handy. Or you can buy me a coffee. Details on the website. I’ve got some feedback here from something else. I can come and talk. at your school, if you wish. And I did do that in back end of November last year. And I’ve got some lovely feedback from the host. So let me just read that to you now. I went to a, collection of schools called the Oaks Collegiate in Southwest Birmingham. Hello, Dave Beard and team. Thank you very much for your feedback, which I shall read out now from Dave. He says,
“Alan made it very easy for us to arrange a training event at short notice with his efficient and professional manner. His extensive knowledge of computing science, teaching strategies, and assessment fitted perfectly for our training day. He listened carefully to our requirements and produced an innovative training program that met all of our expectations. I wouldn’t have any hesitation in recommending Alan to lead training on computing or computer science.”
Well, thank you, Dave. That was brilliant. You were so kind to me on the day. I had a lovely day. And I will happily do that again. And podcast listeners, if you want me to come and talk at your school, I am available for reasonable rates, HTTCS. online. But now let’s get back to that fantastic chat with Ellie.
Are you not a fan of powerpoints, broken into sections, connect, activate, demonstrate? Are you not Ellie?
Ellie: I couldn’t possibly comment. I don’t And I think, I’ve seen lots and lots of different ways. of things being done well. And so I often get asked, what works, what doesn’t work? What’s the great, what’s, what does an outstanding curriculum look like? And actually between one school and another school, even between one class and another class, they look like totally different things.
So It’s thinking about your learners and what works for them. If they are used to certain routines and that does work for them and they understand the structure of that lesson, then actually you’ve got to think how do I bring my subject within that lesson structure, not the other way around. But, If you have got a bit more of a flex and you need to do a bit more of a flex, then how do you navigate that as well?
Alan: And we mentioned, reducing cognitive load there. And that brings us on to perhaps PRIMM and pair programming. So predict, run, investigate, modify, make is now pretty popular.
And that’s. someone called it gradual release of responsibility, isn’t it? It’s a bit like, I do, we do, you do, or use, modify, create. They’re all sort of start slow and easy, if you like, and then get harder and harder. And is that going to work for learners?
Ellie: I think, yeah, I think Where it doesn’t work is where teachers feel like they’ve got to follow the whole PRIMM model in every lesson for every activity. And actually, you might just do part of it. So, a really quick and easy thing in terms of prediction, most classrooms now have got small whiteboards, just predict this really quickly, right? We’re going to make and we’re going to, and we’re going to check at that point. And actually you can do a really small quick activity that follows the same principles
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: It’s not got to be this start to finish big massive project.
Alan: Yeah
Ellie: I think that is, that’s one thing. And then I know you mentioned pair programming I’m in two minds about it, about how well it’s executed and how well those pairings work and it comes back to some of this sort of inclusion, but also some of the gaps. If you’ve got somebody who is less confident and they’re working with somebody who’s more confident, which is quite often a pairing intentionally, is that person who is less confident benefiting? Are they actually being stretched and asked to do something or are they relying on the other learner? And I’ve seen it work well, but I’ve also seen it not work at all, where it’s basically creating passivity in the classroom, which you don’t want, because then you’re exacerbating the gaps.
Alan: Yeah,
Ellie: because then when that learner then does need to do something independently, they’ve actually got more gaps than they had before because the other child who was confident to start with has, flown.
Alan: Yeah. If you can mix it up perhaps with the students working on their own and then at least you will see where the gaps are and I would always walk around and spot who was having trouble. You can have a means of them asking for help and then like putting a red cup on top of the monitor or whatever, and probably can’t fit them on monitors anymore. Um, so that’s programming and stuff. And I’m conscious. We talk quite a lot.
Ellie: Sorry, I did want to mention attendance as well, because attendance is a massive challenge at the moment in schools. And, we do see people from disadvantaged backgrounds, pupils with additional needs, where their attendance is lower than a lot, than some of their peers.
Yeah. And, so that also is going to create differences within the classroom. And what I do see a lot in computing is projects that go from one lesson . to the next lesson, to the next lesson. So if you’ve missed a lesson, you’re already behind. So it comes back to some of those strategies that we mentioned before about actually having some kind of project that you’ve saved yourself as a teacher at various different stages of being created that you can then that learner can pick that up.
At the point where they land back in the classroom and then you can support them to pick up where they’ve missed out. But if they, I can’t imagine anything more disheartening than if you’ve been off if you’re somebody with additional needs, you’ve been off for a medical reason for a couple of weeks, you land in a classroom and everybody is two weeks into a project and you are just starting. You’re going to feel disheartened from the start.
Alan: No, good point. And you talk about attendance. We’ve also got the digital divide at home where pupils may or may not have technology at home to do the homework that you set. So, you can run lunchtime clubs so they can catch up. That’s really not fair because they missed their lunch because they haven’t got a computer at home. So I don’t know what the answer is, but just think about these things.
Ellie: There’s also the question around interventions as well. So you often have children who might need additional support and English and maths is prioritised. So you hear sometimes that those interventions are taking place during other subject time. And so then, Does that also have an impact? And I think, a lot of schools now try to make that a movable feast so that it’s not hitting the same subjects and the same lessons all of the time. But if it is, I think that’s certainly a conversation to have with leaders because you just. Yeah, particularly where we said there are some children who have got additional needs who fly with different subjects. But actually if they’re missing those different subjects and having to stick with the core subjects and those interventions, are they then missing out? So that again is a conversation with leaders around that access to the curriculum
Alan: Yeah You mentioned curriculum then so, let’s go back to if we assume the listeners have some input into the key stage three and four curriculums, how can we make them more inclusive and we haven’t talked a lot about inclusion of ethnicities, cultures and religions in the curriculum. What do you think we can do to make people of different backgrounds feel they can be computer scientists.
Ellie: So I think there’s things that, I know lots of others have talked about in terms of, being able to see it to be it. So thinking about what names you’re using in your projects, what, you know, what.
Alan: I’m laughing there because, I’m laughing there because I think I’ve mentioned this one before, but there was a, I think it was an Edexcel paper in about 2016 that went I blogged about this, that went Heath is playing computer games and wants to know how many minutes he’s spending each day on computer games.
And my class, almost to a pupil all said, what is a Heath? Yeah. And yeah, because Heath was the name of the boy playing computer games, but it’s a name they’d never encountered. And so I blogged about it. “What is a heath?” was the name of the blog. Sorry I interrupted you.
Ellie: No, I think that’s an exact, example and point but, and if it sounds like a basic, I can’t believe that we’re in 2025 and still. talking about that sort of stuff, but there’s those sort of things you display thinking about the context of your projects as well. And, ask the children as well as talk to the pupils about context for projects and things like that. But also I think it’s being able to make those connections to everyday life, but also to children’s futures to people’s futures. And we’ve got to remember that all young people are influenced by home and by what is going on at home. And in the book there is a chapter that myself and Professor Kathy Lewin wrote, which was based on some research we did around children choosing computing at GCSE. And, we talked to children that had chosen it and children that hadn’t. And it was really interesting around, there was this I didn’t see that it fitted and, or I thought it was really difficult and you have to be really good at maths and they were really quite different schools, but both of the schools did not have equality in terms of the types of children that were selected at GCSE. But one of the things that came out really prominently was around the jobs that they were seeing themselves as going into. So if they were going into very traditional jobs like lawyer, doctor, teacher, they didn’t see any relevance of computing to those very traditional jobs and I think that’s something that we can change quite quickly, and there are, cultural differences in terms of thinking about careers and what is a valid career and I think, that is something that really, it’s work to do with the parents as well, it’s work to do with your career service within school in terms of thinking how do we expand and broaden this range. So there’s that side of it. And then there was also the side around young people thinking that it wasn’t creative. So often they would talk about these option blocks and they said, well, I had computer science as an option, but I also had art and I’m really creative and I just wanted to do the creative side.
And I think that comes back to some of this prescriptive nature that we’ve got of some of our. activity designs that we’ve got in classrooms that we, we’re very focused on building that knowledge and building that understanding. But then do we give the children the freedom to play and explore and think, how do I take this into a different direction? Um, Yeah what, what can I, what can I do with this? And our curriculum time is so tight. Yeah, often have time to do that.
Alan: Well, it’s the irony of having tinkering listed as one of the approaches to computational thinking and then having no time for tinkering in the classroom.
Ellie: Yeah. And then it comes back to the digital divide. If you’ve got access at home or the support at home, then yeah. You can tinker.
Alan: Yeah. And coming back to, pupils marked on the register as SEND being surprisingly good at computing. Well, not surprising to me, but to some, one of my pupils let’s call him James and he wrote, we did app lab, apps for good using app lab and he created this thing saying, Oh, it’s a, it’s an app that tells me what music to listen to, depending on what subject I’m revising. And it was brilliant. And it was a web app with like three or four pages and loads of graphics and stuff. And he’d tinkered on it at home and tinkered on it at school and was very proud of this thing.
And. this was someone who was probably predicted a four in maths. And so if you’re gatekeeping computer science, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. But of course he did in my classroom and thrived. So, but it was that he was disadvantaged if you like, in one way, because schools aren’t set up brilliantly for neurodivergent children.
But he did have the advantages of computers at home and a supportive family. And this is almost touching on intersectionality, isn’t it? If pupils are disadvantaged in multiple ways, it can really threaten their life chances, and their ability to thrive in the world after school.
Ellie: Yes, and I think, we talk about the digital divide in terms of access, but actually there’s also a huge amount around support and knowledge at home, and that is in some ways a bigger divide than actual access to devices. And again, coming back to the work that myself and Cathy did, there were there were pupils who were really influenced by family members and lots of them by older siblings actually.
Yeah. “I’ve got an older sibling who studied computing and they’ve done really well at it at college and they said I should do it” and so they were really influenced by that sort of family sphere in terms of where that knowledge and understanding was coming from. And then you’ve also got vertical and horizontal knowledge as Bernstein talked about it in terms of what you learn vertically in a formal way through school, but also what you learn from your community and by your community that includes your home essentially, it’s mainly your home, but actually, there’s a really interesting kind of development in computing in terms of, does that community extend to an online community? So can you actually learn from others it’s potentially something that’s untapped, I think, learning communities where learners support each other and I think, Scratch is quite an interesting example of that, where you’ve got these galleries and you can see each other’s code and you can remix it and you can take that and you can learn from each other and that’s happening on a global scale through Scratch.
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: But actually, can that be used small scale within schools. Where have we got these young people who perhaps would benefit from peer learning in a community that we don’t necessarily use as a resource.
Alan: So we could we could set up. clubs, lunchtime and afterschool clubs and get pupils to work together. That’s something we can do, I think, and I know that some schools do girls only clubs to improve gender balance. Does that work, do you think?
Ellie: So, years ago I used to run a CC4G, computer club for girls and it, it certainly generated interest. But when you look at the numbers and the impact, these things have been going on for years, when you look at the impact of those, it’s minimal. And actually, I think we’re far better addressing the curriculum and thinking, where are the gaps in the curriculum? Where’s the lack of confidence that young people, including girls, but especially girls, have got in their, access to computing and their self belief. So, one of the young people in the research said to us, well, the boys are doing gaming, they’re on computers all the time, so they’re better at it. And they, they got, they haven’t ever been told that was just their interpretation of what was going on in the world. So, Actually, how do we find what their perceptions are and how do we address those through the curriculum? Because actually, what those boys are doing on their Xbox is not actually improving their computing.
Alan: I’m not sure playing Call of Duty Black Ops improves your Python skills, to be honest. It says naming a, an Xbox game that I’ve heard of once, everyone listening on the podcast who plays games going, he’s named a game from 2017. Yeah, there have been games since then. Yeah, no.
So it’s this digital native thing where, you know, because kids have grown up with iPads, they can do stuff, but it’s not, it wasn’t true about digital natives. It’s not true about boys on Xbox being better programmers, but but you’re absolutely right. And girls just. generally speaking, don’t see themselves as computer geeks.
If that’s a, if I can use that positively. So the curriculum you said, and I think this is a big one. I think we do need curriculum reform. We obviously need more AI in it somewhere. But I think we need more, like you said earlier, the impacts and issues, and digital literacy, and I think those are topics within our curriculum that girls can get on board with. more .
Ellie: Definitely, and would be very passionate about, and in a way, looking towards the future and the world that our current learners are going to be living in, that actually it’s more of a critical part of the curriculum, just because we could, doesn’t mean we should. And actually that’s a crucial question around a lot of developments, isn’t it? Yeah. In computing. And I think we have actually got a broad national curriculum at Key Stage 3 across those three strands. But because we’ve got this assessment driven curriculum, we tend to focus on what is going to make sure that the learners are ready for the next steps at key stage four and particularly around that GCSE which is in computer science and I think we’ve got this mismatch at the minute with qualifications and with the national curriculum and that also needs fixing alongside the curriculum reform actually. I can’t imagine in maths you would have a GCSE where you say actually two thirds of the national curriculum is not going to be tested in the GCSE. That, yeah that makes no sense to me. And so it makes it really difficult for teachers and leaders to design a curriculum that is broad and engaging, but also has this readiness for next steps, which is a critical, aim, isn’t it? Of you curriculum design.
Alan: Yeah. So we redesign the curriculum. We have lots of different opportunities to demonstrate skills in the classroom, I said about sub goals and so on and what else can we do to make the computing classroom more inclusive. Have we missed anything? -I think- in our long conversation at this point, have we…
Ellie: For me, it’s the criticality of connections between subjects and the real world that computing is not seen as a silo subject that you either can do it or you can’t and it’s either relevant to you or it’s not because actually we need the young people to have those connections and say, right, okay, this is how this will impact me. This is how it’s relevant to me.
Alan: Absolutely. Right, well, I think we should go and get on with all of that now.
Ellie: Yes, quite a bit to do.
Alan: Yeah, I think I’m going to be busy all weekend now. I’ve got, that’s a lot, that’s a lot to take on. Um, that was brilliant. I’m going to have that problem of “can I fit all of this into a reasonable sized podcast?” now, because we’ve been talking for ages, Ellie, as we always do.
Ellie: I know, and I could have talked all day as well.
Alan: Yeah. Well, well, Undoubtedly, if I’m still doing this podcast in a few months time, I’ll ask you back. But lovely to talk to you. And thanks very much for coming on the podcast.
Ellie: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Alan: Thank you, Ellie.
Well, that’s a wrap for another episode. Don’t forget, podcast listeners can get a 20 percent discount off all books at johncattbookshop. com with the code HTTCSPOD. If you already have the books, buy me a coffee please at ko-fi.com/MrAHarrisonCS. All links are on my blog at httcs.online/blog and subscribe now so you don’t miss a thing.
Have a great weekend and I’ll catch you next time
How to Teach Computer Science 
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