This is the transcript of podcast Series 2 Episode 2.
Alan: Welcome to how to teach computer science, the podcast and series two episode two, and I’m delighted to have two experts on the pod today. Becci Peters and Andrew Virnuls and me talking about the key stage four curriculum and qualifications.
We’ve got a lot of online safety that we need to teach so that should continue into Key Stage 4, probably in PSHE lessons and assemblies.
Becci: I would have thought a lot of it goes into PSHE.
Andrew: I’m just looking at the Key Stage 4. The thing about the Key Stage 4 computing curriculum, it doesn’t really say a lot, does it?
Alan: More of that in a moment first some news. I dropped my laptop last week. And half the ASCII character set, fell out specifically all the punctuation marks in fact so I must apologize now for the lack of pauses in the scripted bit yes. It’s scripted. What do you mean? It doesn’t sound like it I’ll have, you know, I worked all week on this and now it sounds ridiculous because not only are all the commas and full stops missing, but the apostrophes too, I cant believe it. It sounds really silly ill do my best, but im struggling to be honest, let me download ASCII and start again.
Phew. That’s better. I hope you’re all backing up your data. I’ve got all mine in several places, multiple cloud providers and memory sticks. I bought a new memory stick last week, actually, which gave me a fright. I opened the package and it flew out buzzing loudly and saying how y’all do. Y’all got any honey. And I realized it was a US Bee.
My name’s Alan Harrison, and I wrote the books how to teach computer science and how to learn computer science available in online bookstores. And if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in-person. Visit. HTTCS dot online to find out more about my training and consultancy, and I could be speaking soon, live at your school on inset day jokes, optional. More details about this and book purchase links at HTTCS dot online. The initials of how to teach computer science.online. Listeners to the podcast, a special discount code to just type HTTCS pod in the checkout Page at johncattbookshop.com to get 20% off everything.
That’s everything including classics, such as teaching walkthroughs by Tom Sherrington, the Huh series by Mary Myatt. And of course my two little books.
Speaking of books, I’ve had an idea for a new business. Anyone want to come in with me. Audio books, right. Hear me out. But with subtitles. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a winner.
Imogen: Alan, that’s just a book.
Alan: Oh, yeah. Hey. Alexa. What type of music do wind turbines like?
Alexa: They’re big metal fans.
Alan: Let’s meet my special guests. Becci Peters and Andrew Virnuls and ask the fertile question. What is our key stage four curriculum?
Yeah, so on the podcast today I’ve got two very experienced and clever people, so I’m going to let them do most of the talking today. First up, we’ve got a chap from episode three. Andrew Virnuls, nice to speak to you again. How are you?
Andrew: I’m fine, thank you.
Alan: Just remind the listeners what you do for me, please.
Andrew: For the rest of this term, I’m currently the lead teacher and computing specialist for a local authority service in Warwickshire that teaches children who are out of school for medical reasons, which I think raises some interesting issues when we talk about Key Stage 3 and GCSE later on.
Alan: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about curriculum later on and qualifications, and an expert in such things is with me as well. The wonderful Becci Peters. How are you, Becci?
Becci: I’m good. Thanks, Alan. How are you?
Alan: I’m good. Remind me what your role is, please.
Becci: So I work for CAS, Computing at School, which is part of BCS I’m the secondary computing lead. So I support computing teachers from all across the UK. So if you are not a member of CAS, come join us. It’s all completely free. And yeah, we just support teachers in any way that we can. Looking at resources, putting on free webinars just generally trying to support teachers because it is a very hard job. It’s been four years since I was in the classroom but there were some enjoyable times in there while I was in there.
Alan: Brilliant. Yeah, no, I can second that because I wouldn’t be where I am today. If it wasn’t for CAS, because I jumped in the deep end nearly 10 years ago now and joined CAS and downloaded all the resources that were free on the website and went to all the meetings and met lots of other teachers who were all doing the same thing going, “have you got something to do that? How do we do this?” And we’re all shared our experience. And then there was some brilliant free training run out of Edge Hill on behalf of CAS by The wonderful Carl Simmons and I went to like Saturday CPD for free and that was the making of me really when I was an early computing teacher. So yeah, CAS has been there for me.
So definitely if you’re listening to this, join CAS and see what they can do. I am still a CAS master teacher running occasional meetings in Manchester, but so do that. It’s great to have you both here. So we’re going to talk about the Key Stage 4 curriculum and qualifications today because we have a bit of an odd situation in our subject, don’t we, in that there’s a national curriculum and then there’s a GCSE and they don’t match.
Isn’t that right, Andrew?
Andrew: Yes and no to a certain extent. I think one of the issues we have is when students start the GCSE because some schools within the county start in year nine and I thought what we’re going to do with that because most schools still see that as part of GCSE, but if you look at the content there is enough in common I think not to make that a problem, but yes I think in some ways what’s in the GCSE doesn’t match exactly so there’s, if you, I’ve got the list of bullet points up here, so the creative projects and those sorts of aspects is that what you’re referring to as not being in the computer science GCSE certainly.
Alan: Yeah, there’s a mention of creative projects and there’s not a lot of digital literacy in the computer science GCSE which is why maybe we’ll get some kind of alternative GCSE qualification. Becci, do you know anything about that?
Becci: Oh, I might do. Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that’s definitely That is really bizarre about our subject, that computing at Key Stage 3 obviously has your three separate strands, your digital literacy, your IT and your computer science, and then we just do one third of that at GCSE and there’s nothing else, and I do find it really odd, and that’s one of the things that we’re lobbying for at the moment is a reform for computing qualifications at Key Stage 4.
And the idea being that we should have qualifications that cover all three aspects of the subject and not just the computer science. And making sure that, all students when they leave school, they’ve got not only the digital literacy skills that they need to go into, whatever line of work they go into, but then they’ve got that option of, the kind of the IT side of things versus the computer science side of things.
Alan: Yeah, that would be great. I was, I remember being shocked really when Michael Gove, bless his cotton socks, said that, ICT would be discontinued and I think the exam boards were shocked at the time because they had a new reformed GCSE ready to go, I believe, and then it was like, no, we’ve got to get everyone onto computer science, and then so the result was, is that overall the numbers taking a computing related qualification dropped when we lost ICT, which is a bit sad.
So the numbers are recovering a bit, I think but there are alternative qualifications at Key Stage 4. Let me see what, which ones I’ve taught over the years. Anyone remember CIDA? Certificate in digital. I remember teaching flash animation for the last couple of years before it was killed off by Adobe.
Flash was quite fun to teach. But completely useless in the end. Yeah. Any any qualifications out there that you enjoyed teaching or not? Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah, we started, we used to have a lot of different qualifications that we had to teach at the same time because of the nature of the service teaching children from across the county.
So we had things like BTEC and we had OCR Nationals, CIDA and DIDA and working out, which bits apply to which and which. What were the requirements for the different coursework components and things like that. Then of course within those you had the different modules as well, didn’t you?
So you could choose your spreadsheets and your your kind of presentation things. Multimedia products there seemed to be a lot of I recall and finding free examples of everything from the web.
Alan: What I remember from that from teaching CIDA and then Cambridge Nationals, I think there was a lot of describing what you do without mentioning the software you’re supposed to use in the specification, because they’re not supposed to say what software you use, and then you just ask teachers and you go, what’s this?
And, oh, that’s the PowerPoint unit. And, like, what’s this? Oh, that’s the web design unit. You need something like Dreamweaver or whatever.
Andrew: That was always the case in ICT as well, I don’t know if you remember that, and Business and Communication Systems, I don’t know if you remember that, that was interesting.
Alan: What did that mean then, Andrew?
Andrew: That was back in the days of ICT, it was a kind of, Half and half business studies and it, oh yeah. So you’d use your spreadsheets to do like a breakeven analysis or whatever. So I quite liked that what we liked about it as a service was there was no coursework.
’cause that was back in the days when most GCSEs were 60% coursework. And obviously portfolio based qualification is like the nationals. And cider and DDA were a hundred percent coursework, which is a bit of a headache for students who are out of school.
Alan: Yeah. Absolutely. And in fact, we were talking about this last week Rachel Arthur and I, and she called these the screenshot qualifications where you had to do your research and you had to research potential software to deliver the product you were trying to make, which meant lots of Googling and screenshots and then pasted in and described in your own words, which were often very similar to the words off the website they Googled.
And and yeah. And we were talking about, it was in a conversation about the qualifications and who should take what and whether we should gatekeep computer science or not, as in only offer it to certain students. And Rachel and I were both vehemently against that and saying that computer science should be available to all.
It is a nine to one, level one, level two qualification. And so anyone who wants to take it should be able to take it.
Becci: I remember when the GCSE first came in and there was a lot of schools weren’t there, they would say, you’ve got to be in, top set maths or you’ve got to be predicted or whatever.
But I remember a couple of examples. There was one student who was actually not very good at maths and didn’t meet the criteria that the school had set for doing GCSE. But was actually a complete, like, had learnt to program in his spare time, was far better than all the kids, even by the end of year 11, and I was like, we are definitely going against the rules here to allow, how can we not allow this kid to do it, even though somebody set these arbitrary rules.
And another school that I taught in, And there was there was a student who got he got a grade two at the end of his GCSE, but that was a real achievement for him. You know what I mean? He got grade twos and, sometimes lower in, in subjects across the board. So for him to get a grade two in computer science, he was really proud of that at the end.
And he worked really hard to get it, so he deserved it.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely, and we mustn’t forget that grade one, two and three can be a positive progress eight score for students as well. I think some SLTs are still stuck in the old five A star to C mindset and success is just defined by a grade four or five rather than what success means for that pupil.
Andrew: ECDL. Remember that was another one, wasn’t it? And so I warmed to that, actually. I know it had a bad name, but what I, because it was exam based.
Alan: It was a nice little qualification, but it never should have counted as a GCSE.
Andrew: Yeah, and that’s fair enough, but at least you had to be able to do it. One of the things that always bothered me about the portfolio I think one of the things that I think is really interesting is that, a lot of the web based qualifications is, we’d pick up a new student and they said, Oh, I’ve already done my DIDA spreadsheet module. I’ve got a distinction. And you say, Oh, can you just add these two numbers together?
And they wouldn’t be able to do it. And I think it was because they’d only ever done stuff once and they could, and because of that, there was no mastery. And I guess the retrieval stuff from our cognitive science they just didn’t remember what they’d done and none of them could ever explain how their websites work or how their spreadsheets worked or anything.
Alan: It’s a, it’s an argument against modular qualifications really, isn’t it? This is a one that I’ve argued a number of times and some very well meaning people don’t seem to get it. I think there’s a, if we get a new government, we might get another push back towards sort of modular qualifications and coursework based qualifications.
But the problem is, exactly as you say, Andrew, they they, Do the work for the upcoming test module or exam and deliver it and forget it and then move on. And I think GCSE gives you the space to do that mastery teaching with the terminal exams, meaning that you’ve got two years to really dig deep and explore a qualification and do, like you say, mastery learning.
I much prefer the terminal exams.
Becci: I think some kind of like hybrid would be the best case scenario because we know some students really struggle with that terminal exam and trying to remember everything that they’ve learned in two years from every subject. So I think if there was some kind of, it was a modular aspect in terms of, right, we’re going to assess you on the bit that we’ve learned up till this stage, but it’s also going to be assessed in a terminal exam because they can’t just forget it and move on.
I think that kind of situation would probably be a fairer approach.
Alan: On qualifications, the When I was talking earlier about the screenshot qualifications, as Rachel called, Rachel Arthur called it, and we, I think portfolio qualifications is another good phrase, Andrew. I think one of the problems of suggesting those qualifications for those students which are quote weaker or lower prior attainment is one, one of the problems with them I always found is there’s huge amounts of writing.
Therefore, there’s huge amounts of literacy needed. The students who are predicted a 3 in maths are unlikely to have the literacy skills to deliver a decent portfolio qualification. What do you think about that?
Andrew: I also found that as a teacher, It was more difficult to know what to get them to write.
We had, last year we had a student who was doing the BTEC, what’s it called, the digital applications one. And I had to keep referring back to the school because I could understand what it was they were supposed to be doing in terms of the spreadsheet, but I wasn’t entirely sure what they should be saying about it myself, even as a teacher.
I think lots of those vocational courses had quite confusing specifications.
Alan: They do like I said earlier, they try to lead you towards delivering, they give you a specification for a product without telling you what software you’re supposed to use. You have to work it out. You have to read between the lines of the specification a lot.
I found it really difficult. Back to the GCSE then. So we said it differs somewhat from computing, but how can you build a computing curriculum that delivers towards a decent GCSE performance? What do we do at Key Stage 3 that will help deliver the GCSE computer science results we want.
Becci: I think part of the difficulty comes from the idea that because you only, the GCSE is only one third of the subject, so are you going to prioritise just teaching computer science because that’s what some of the students are going to go on to do.
At Key Stage 4, or what are you going to teach all of it? Which is what obviously everybody should do. Yeah, and I think that’s part of the kind of the difficulty is working out that bit. I’d like to think that everybody is teaching all of it, but at the end of the day it all comes down to time, doesn’t it?
And if the curriculum time in the school is not enough, then you’re not Really going to be able to properly teach everything and it’s a shame really. I think it needs to be, I think computing as a subject needs to be more valued within schools. Not quite sure how we do that, but I thought for a long time that computing should be as important as English and maths.
Andrew: I think it was interesting that, coming after ICT, because ICT was really explicit in terms of what you needed to do. And it’s a bit more, I don’t want to say vague, but it’s less detailed, isn’t it? And I think depending on your background, you have probably have a different interpretation of what those key stage three bullets mean.
So you and I we did O level computer studies. And with that, in our background I look at things like, be able to carry out simple operations on binary numbers. I’m just reading off the screen there. So in my head, I’m thinking about things like bitwise logic and stuff that we did when we were at school.
So in some ways I actually do probably more in Key Stage 3 than I would do in the GCSE, even in terms of computer Computer science because I look at that and I think about, he talks about communication. So I’d be thinking parity which isn’t in the GCSE. And in some ways I feel like I’m going backwards slightly when I’m going to the GCSE.
Alan: Little bit. Yeah. So we were talking about this, weren’t we? And I remember in my computer studies O level exam writing the program in binary, we talked about that. We had an instruction set, a bit like the little man computer. But it had the binary codes and it had a. Addresses in binary and I had to literally fill in the noughts and ones to write a little program to add two numbers in binary.
And you just think, could you do that now? Could you get today’s kids to do that? And I think, like you say, one of the problems is curriculum time at key stage three. And the other one is probably, specialist teachers or lack of. So we’ve got a big headache and we’ve got Ofsted trying to Trying to drive, trying to move the needle, if you like, on numbers and curriculum time with the Ofsted Research Review, which talks about how one hour a week is the bare minimum, almost not quite those words, but that’s what they’re saying.
And GCSE, uptake, schools should be focusing on getting the numbers up and also delivering Key Stage 4 national curriculum as a bare minimum to everyone. There’s a lot of talk about that. I’ve been talking to teachers about that. A lot of schools are worried about being deep dived and not actually offering anything at Key Stage 4 to everybody.
What can schools do if they’re really short of specialist teachers?
Andrew: It’s difficult to say because presumably we didn’t have the specialist teachers. When we were at school, I remember our computer studies teachers, one of them was a math teacher, and one of them was a biology teacher, so were teachers more engaged in teaching other subjects, or was it a kind of, were they enthusiastic hobbyists at that time?
Alan: We had one, we had, One chap that come out from industry, do you remember Plessy technology? They did electronics and stuff. So he, so I guess he was a bit like me, 40 years ago, come from industry and went into school to teach a bit of computing. And then there was a guy that came down from university, Dr. Beckman. Yeah, great name, couldn’t teach. And I felt sorry for him because the the bad kids would give him a run for his money. But he would come down from University and he’d done research projects in Fortran and stuff like that and he was trying to teach computer studies. I don’t know, Becci, what can we do?
Becci: I’ve heard of some teachers using things like the idea award and trying to map that across to the key stage four curriculum. As a way of, because it doesn’t require a specialist, the students generally should be able to access most of that on their own. They’ll get a certificate at the end of it.
No, it’s not a qualification. Does that matter? No, not really. So that’s one kind of way around it, but I think. There’s obviously parts of the Key Stage 4 National Curriculum that are computer science y, which is going to need to be taught by a specialist really, but you could do that in drop down days or, extracurricular days or something like that.
You could make it more fun as opposed to just doing, oh here’s a lesson and I’m going to teach you this topic, and they could learn those skills and that knowledge in a, in a more creative, fun environment rather than just having to go out here’s a one hour slot once a term or something ridiculous.
Alan: We’ve got a lot of online safety that we need to teach as well, so that really should continue into Key Stage 4, probably in PSHE lessons and assemblies.
Becci: I would have thought a lot of it goes into PSHE.
Andrew: I’m just looking at the Key Stage 4. The thing about the Key Stage 4 computing curriculum, it doesn’t really say a lot, does it?
So it’s got three bullet points and it just says develop capability and, apply problem solving skills and there’s a bit about safety. And I was thinking about, you’re talking about Ofsted, I was thinking about when I first started teaching and we were doing the ICT. Again, ICT Key Stage 4 was quite detailed and it used to say things like, you had Develop existing knowledge and understanding of measurement, control, and modeling.
And so the course that I was talking about with the business and communication systems didn’t have any of that stuff in it. It was it was more kind of spreadsheet y and presentations and writing letters and that kind of thing. And Ofsted would not only check that you were doing ICT at Key Stage 4, but they would check that you were doing the whole thing.
So if you were doing business with the communication systems, they’d say, Oh, you’re not doing any control there. You need to do that. as well. So I think Ofsted have relaxed those sorts of requirements, but maybe because it’s not as explicit.
Becci: I think part of it comes down to the explicit, I can’t say it, but also I Like most Ofsted inspectors will have zero computing background subject knowledge, so they’re not able to go into a school and do a deep dive for computing and be able to pick up on those things, whereas it would be easy for them to do that in any other subject, because they probably did that at school.
So I think that’s a good point. You know that’s part of the difficulty behind it. Like I remember there used to be GCSE IT and then there used to be the short course IT and everybody had to do that and you know you could opt to do the full GCSE but everyone was made to do the short version.
So I don’t know why we couldn’t have something like that where there was, it was a GCSE, but not a full GCSE, but I don’t think short courses exist anymore. Do they?
Alan: PE does it so if you rem. Yeah. So RE maybe, possibly RE in some schools, I know PE is a national curriculum subject that needs to continue to key stage four and schools tend to do, yeah, schools give a qualification there in my experience.
Not the qualification. No. So yeah, there is, there, there is a PE GCSE and there’s sports science vocationals and stuff. And schools, we’ll often do core PE, which is like one lesson, a fortnight. And then they’ll do one of the PE or sport science type options for those that want to go into that kind of career.
And so we could have something similar to that. And I’m not sure how we get there. I think it’s, bodies like Ofsted, possibly NCCE, and possibly CAS can all move us in that direction it’s just how we get across to schools that they really need to be offering all Key Stage 4, some kind of computing education.
Becci: Yeah, I know Pete Dring’s doing a session at the CAS conference off the top of my head about Key Stage 4 qualifications and what schools can do about it. And I know other people are, there’s a computing lead in one of the maths is trying to take each of the Key Stage 4 national curriculum bullet points, all three of them, or however few there are.
I’m trying to map them with other subjects to try and see where they could be fitted in elsewhere, so it doesn’t necessarily require a specialist time, but it ticks the box to say they’ve all been done.
Alan: I think there’s a lot of value in that. And, if you think about subjects like maths and science, they could very easily put a little bit of, IT and sometimes a bit of computer science into their curriculum.
For example, in science, you could record the results of an experiment in Excel and plot the graph of, if you’re doing specific heat capacity or something of different metals and heating them up on a Bunsen burner with a thermometer in, this is one that I remember from my chemistry lessons.
Then yeah, you plot that in the, in Excel rather than just on graph paper, and that’s, that might be one way of doing it.
Andrew: I teach maths as well and I do that. I, we use spreadsheets occasionally. Also what I do is when we’re doing exterior angles and drawing polygons, I do it in Scratch, put the, pop the pen down, move and turn and those sorts of things.
The students quite like that because you can do little experiments and it’s much quicker for them to redo stuff. In Scratch then you’d like rub it out or if they’re drawing it on paper and those sorts of things. Yeah,
Alan: yeah, Scratch maths is a good one. I think So given where we’re at now, where we don’t have an alternative IT qualification, apart from vocationals, which aren’t suitable for everyone, I think across the curriculum, plus PSHE, plus drop down days, perhaps.
Andrew: I was going to mention PSHE, because when I worked in a school we used to do ICT certificates of competence, they were called, in PSHE. I guess IDEA would be the kind of modern equivalent of that, wouldn’t it? Do schools do that these days?
Alan: Absolutely. Yeah so maybe schools could do like the bronze award in year 10 and the silver award in year 11 or something as part of their computing offer.
I’d love to see that.
Becci: I don’t even think you need to wait till year, Key Stage 4 to be able to start that. I used to do bronze award. I used to start at the year 7. And then we used to, spend part of the lesson saying, this is how you log in, and this is the concept behind it, and this is what’s going to happen.
I used to set it as homework, so you could obviously easily track, how has a student done at least one badge in the last week, just downloading the data and quick comparison. And the amount of times at the end of the lesson, they’d have a quick go over one or two activities, and they’d be like, Miss, can I do this at home?
I’m like, yes, please go and do this at home. Yeah, as much as you like, you’d have some of them completed silver before the end of year eight. Some of them wouldn’t, some of them were less inclined, even if you just start that in year seven, I’d like to think that every student by the end of year 11 could at least get a bronze.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s one way of doing it. So what else did Osted say? Have we have, we covered everything Ofsted said.
Andrew: Digital natives, they mentioned which is interesting because in terms of digital literacy, I think probably over the last 20 years, there’s been a noticeable decline in students general ICT skills, their ability to operate the computer.
Yeah, I don’t know why that’s come up. What was that thing, wasn’t it, Bill Gates said that at some point, the the computer will be like a fridge or a television. It would just be a piece of equipment. And I think when I first started teaching in the 90s, they’re all very excited, and they’re all very focused on using the computers.
And then it’s, they’ve all become quite blasé because they’ve all got one at home. And then, In fact, not all students have one now because some of them have got, tablets or phones and they’re not used to filing and typing and using mice and all those sorts of things.
Alan: So what vital digital literacy do we need? Do they need to leave school with? I was talking With my role at the NCCE there was a professional development leaders conference and I heard from the digital poverty alliance. Have you seen the work that they do? And that was eye opening, the digital divide is as big or bigger than it’s ever been, between those that can, take a full part in society and those that can’t because they don’t have access to technology.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever done any dealings with the tax office or the benefits office or any of the government agencies. If you haven’t got a smartphone and data, then you can’t do it. No one answers the phone anymore.
Andrew: It’s that accessibility to, all the best deals on for your electricity and all those sorts of issues as well, car insurance and all manner of things.
Alan: Yeah, so it’s not a nice to have anymore. It’s having digital skills and the resources to use them as in a device and some internet at home has become vital. It’s now, like, like you say, they called the Digital Poverty Alliance for a reason. It’s a kind of poverty.
Andrew: That was the thing about 25 years ago. That was the focus of the Blair government. They talked about the information underclass and it doesn’t seem to have got any better.
Alan: No, it’s if anything got worse. So coming back to the positives then. What can we do? We’ve talked about delivering across the curriculum. We’ve talked about delivering, some kind of computing education to all by using cross curricular methods, using the idea badges, having drop down days, assemblies and PSHE lessons on digital literacy and online safety.
That’s what we can do at the moment. Have I missed anything?
Andrew: I wonder whether there’s opportunities to do things in a kind of way that might appear to be non computing. So quite often, like in primary schools, there’s a focus on algorithms, isn’t there? But it doesn’t have to be related to computers. They could talk about methods for doing all sorts of things.
My son came home and said, oh, we’ve been doing algorithms today. We talked about how to get dressed. And I’m guessing some subjects would have, there must be methods for computing. Making dovetail joints in DT or whatever that you could codify in some way like a like an algorithm.
Becci: Yeah, I’ve seen examples of like learning a dance routine. That’s an algorithm. And you’ve got subroutines when you get to a chorus and obviously you can do that in music as well.
Alan: And that’s a good one for for subroutines. Yes, music and dance.
Becci: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that I find really bizarre is that in primary they don’t really have like set lessons in terms of a subject, they’ll just obviously have activities. So they might have, the Tudors as their theme and then everything is based around that. But they’re not specifically told, oh, this is English, or this is computing, or this is history. They’re obviously going to, if it’s the Tudors as the theme, there’ll be history embedded throughout, but they might be doing different things, whether it’s art, or whether it’s literacy, or whatever it might be.
And I don’t understand why we lose that quite so much in secondary, apart from the fact obviously we’ve got subject specialists that they don’t necessarily have in primaries, but I feel like that aspect of cross curricular needs to happen more in secondaries.
Andrew: I think they missed opportunities as well, so my, when my daughter did the Romans, they did Caesar’s shift ciphers and they did converting to Roman numerals, but they didn’t do them in a computing sense, and they, they, I think they missed an opportunity there, they could have written down a method for doing the Caesar shift cipher, how to convert numbers to Roman numerals.
Alan: Oh, I wrote a program to convert decimal to Roman numerals with my class. It was a nightmare. It’s actually much harder than you think.
Andrew: I did that with my daughter, so it’s on my personal website. And yeah, it is because you have to look too ahead. It’s not like the change example. Yeah, people do.
Alan: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. But yeah, no, that’s a good, that’s a good one. And it comes back to cultural capital in a way, isn’t it? So how can you put. Cultural capital into our subject. That’s mentioned in the Ofsted report. And, it’s all of these things, the Caesar cipher. What’s that mean? Caesar was a Roman emperor, and then you’re suddenly talking about that. And then you’re talking about the code breakers at Bletchley Park and so on. Any cultural capital that you’d like to put in,
Andrew: I like to throw in some stuff at random, so if you, the sorting games on my website, for example, the merge sort, when you choose Whether you merged it from the left list or the right list, they’re colored red and green, which is the same uses of red and green as they are in the nautical world for port and starboard. Port and starboard. Which I did deliberately.
Alan: Throwing it in everywhere. Links, everything’s linked to something else. It’s like the matrix, good stuff. Ah yeah, I think we’ve We’ve had a good chat about Key Stage 4 curriculum, qualifications, what Ofsted think, how to deliver Key Stage 4 computing across the curriculum.
I think that’s been very useful. We’ve kept to time roughly today. I think I’ve probably got, what, 40 minutes of brilliant conversation there. I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We can talk about workloads soon, aren’t we? Are you up for that?
Becci: Sure, why not?
Andrew: Yeah,
Alan: why not? That’s brilliant. Thank you very much for that it’ll be a while yet. These have got a few backed up. Because you wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve got a day job as well, right, I better go. Thank you very Much for your time.
Becci: Thanks, Alan.
Andrew: Bye.
Alan: Thanks, bye.
That’s a wrap for another pod. What a great chat. Quiet, correct horse battery staple. Just opening Microsoft Authenticator. 9 1 5, 3, 2, 2, and tap authorize.
It took so long to teach him to wait for two factor authentication. You would not believe it. I know it sounds far fetched. Doesn’t it?
In other news, my family were all sitting on the sofa, watching a Christmas film at the weekend. I asked them to make room for me by shifting one place to the left and. Oh, they doubled in size. Must be all the mince pies
don’t forget podcast listeners can get 20% discount off all books at johncattbookshop.com with a code HTTCSPOD or if you already have the books. Buy me a coffee, please. At ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs. All links on my blog at HTTCS dot online slash blog and subscribe now. So you don’t miss a thing. Have a great week. I’ll catch you next time.
How to Teach Computer Science 
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