PRIMARY AND SECONDARY NEWS ace
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY NEWS
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY NEWS Game on for coding
London-based start-up Code Kingdoms, which teaches computer science to children by allowing them to build and share game worlds with their friends, launches for kids aged 6–13 years old. Founded by Entrepreneur First alumni
Ross Targett and Hugh Collins, Code Kingdoms has partnered with the BBC on the MakeItDigital campaign, helping to put a coding device in the hands of one million Year 7 students. They have partnered with Teach First to train their cohort of primary teachers in using Code Kingdoms to teach the Computing National Curriculum, and also have secured partnerships with Code Club, Hour of Code and other key players in the digital education space. Code Kingdoms allows children to
an intuitive understanding. A 'digital flyby' incorporating terrain and magnetometer visualisations can be recreated in the Minecraſt world from actual data downloaded from the International Space Station and replicated by anyone that owns a Raspberry Pi. Minecraſt has a huge draw with young
children and is available on the Raspberry Pi platform as a Pocket Edition variant with a Python interface that allows programmatic
t-of-date education Despite Ofsted encouraging teachers to
use computers and the internet to enhance learning, research conducted on behalf of Daisy Group, found that 60% of children (aged between 11 and 16) use ICT within lessons sporadically or not at all. The survey found clear regional divides
with regards to the use of ICT in secondary education. In the south of England more than half of children (56%) say the internet is only used occasionally in lessons. In the north of England this rises to 71%. The differences were even starker in
certain localities. In Cambridge, for example, nearly two-thirds of children (63%) say they use the internet at least twice a day in lessons, whereas in Sheffield, just 16% do the same. In London, one in five children (19%) use the internet in every lesson, but in Yorkshire, almost as many (14%) say they ‘never’ use the use internet in class.
According to the research, interactive
whiteboards are the predominant teaching tool with 55% of children saying they were regularly used, but a quarter (24%) said blackboards and chalk were a mainstay in the classroom. Just a third of children said they were likely to regularly use a computer (35%) in lessons, and only a quarter said they frequently used mobile tablet devices (27%). When asked about how fast the internet was
at their school, one in five children (21%) said that the internet was so slow that their lessons
"Schools need more encouragement to seek out specialist expertise to get the robust ICT systems they need"
manipulation of the game's blocks. The Astro Pi project comprises a primary
school competition and a secondary school competition. Whilst the primary category was based on ideas and has already been judged, the coding section of the secondary category is still open and primary students, even if they haven’t already entered the primary category, are able to submit coding in the youngest age bracket of the secondary school competition.
work alone or collaborate with friends and classmates to build game levels, code new characters or simply play the built- in worlds while aiming to defeat evil Glitches, the characters that seek to put bugs into code. Free to use in schools and running on
any operating system or device, the game uses real JavaScript and is aligned to the UK’s coding curriculum, which was introduced in September 2014. The game has been designed to offer students an opportunity to build their coding skills outside of a formal classroom environment.
were disrupted whenever they used it. Nearly half of the children surveyed (41%) said that internet speeds at home were much faster than at school. Nathan Marke, Chief Technology Officer at
Daisy Group, said: “Until the whole of the UK is able to benefit from high speed broadband, there will always be some schools at a slight disadvantage when it comes to the internet. “However, according to our research, that
isn’t necessarily the problem. Unfortunately, those responsible for procuring ICT, such as school managers and bursars, are oſten not experts, so it is easy for them to get the ‘shopping’ criteria wrong, especially with regards to internet connectivity. Subsequently, teachers are oſten leſt to work with an infrastructure that isn’t fit for purpose. “Schools need more encouragement to
seek out specialist expertise to get the robust ICT systems they need. That way, we can be confident that schools will make the best use of taxpayers’ money and deliver an education that will better prepare children for the tech- focused society we live in.”
@Educ_Technology |
www.edtechnology.co.uk | 09
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74