Tag: Discovery Education Coding

Primary computing for British international schools

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The Alice Smith School, Malaysia is one of the oldest and most prestigious British international schools in Asia. Based in Kuala Lumpur, the school welcomes children from around the world and teaches over 1600 pupils from pre-school to Year 13.

The school follows a British curriculum, and teachers use Discovery Education Coding to bring primary computing to life. Computing Specialist Catherine Archer explains how the platform helps students to build vital skills and supports blended learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CURRICULUM-MATCHED CODING

We started using Discovery Education Coding earlier this year. As a specialist computing teacher, I know what I’m looking for and what works in the classroom. I could immediately see that this platform was right for our school, particularly at Key Stage 2. It’s closely mapped to the British National Curriculum and covers key coding concepts. It’s easy for teachers to use and engaging for children.

MAKING CODING FUN

One of the things I like best about Discovery Education Coding is how it’s structured. The different levels help pupils to understand concepts such as sequencing, selection and debugging, while short activities allow children to build and see results quickly. There are bubbles that pop, floating ghosts, racing planes and aquariums with fish that swim across the screen. These colourful concepts really appeal to my students and they love using the platform. They can easily code a game and make it fun.

ACCESSIBLE LEARNING

It is very accessible. Each activity supports individual learners’ needs via use of short videos, onscreen and audio instructions. Most coding platforms involve lots of reading, but Discovery Education Coding is more intuitive. Key words are highlighted throughout, enabling children to check their meaning. This triangle of key words, video and audio enables every child to succeed. For this reason, the platform really wins out for me in terms of accessibility.

HELPING PUPILS TO GO FURTHER

Discovery Education Coding supports independent learning because each lesson or activity is self-contained. It’s also broken down into small chunks, so students can master each skill before moving onto the next. This makes it easy to differentiate and to help higher ability pupils to progress.

Some of the activities touch upon more complex variables and game playing, enabling these children to go deeper into the maths: e.g. they can use degrees, x/y co-ordinates and Boolean (a branch of algebra in which the values of the variables are the truth values true and false) expressions in their games. This helps me to make each lesson a little more challenging. The platform also provides the cornerstones of computational thinking and helps pupils to build problem solving skills. I can extend their learning with algorithm writing or by setting a challenge at the end of a tutorial.

SUPPORT FOR TEACHERS

Discovery Education Coding offers extensive teacher support and you don’t need to be a specialist to use it. The platform includes explanatory videos and helpful lesson plans. I like the fact that teachers can pick it up and run with it without help. Many non-specialist teachers lack the confidence to teach coding and particularly struggle with debugging. As its tutorials are self-contained, and deal with one topic at a time, it’s much easier for teachers to help pupils to problem solve.

DISTANCE LEARNING

It’s vital that children can access good quality computing resources while studying at home. I’m using Discovery Education Coding to support distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s working well. I tend to pre-record my coding lessons and I combine this with Discovery Education’s online coding activities. With my Year 3 pupils, for example, I’ve been using the platform to teach key coding words. So, we’ll focus on several activities and one key word which underpins these, e.g. input. We’ll look at the activities to get used to the specific blocks, and I’ll assess the children at the end of the lesson using an external multiple choice quiz.

SPARKING IMAGINATION

Recently, my Year 4 pupils took part in a coding challenge organised by Discovery Education and COBIS. Using the platform at home, they designed their own apps featuring ‘everyday hero’ characters. They began by designing characters and backgrounds before adding code to create sound, movement and scoring. The challenge really fired their imagination and they created some brilliant apps! One student designed a game featuring a famous environmentalist fighting through a jungle, while another created a superhero dog racing across a maze. From a home learning perspective it was a real success!

IGNITING CREATIVITY

It supports the development of creative thinking and offers a good balance between tutorials and independent learning. There’s plenty of room for creativity with open-ended activities at the end of each unit and a free code area where pupils can code from scratch. This is the area that my students enjoy most. They love the opportunity to be independent and to exercise their imagination. There’s a complete library of coding blocks that they can use to build exciting games.

CODING FOR EVERYONE

For me, Discovery Education Coding is one of the most accessible resources that I’ve come across. It caters for every child and can be used by specialist and non-specialist teachers. Kids can create something very quickly and build a fun game or app that they are proud of. There is nothing more delightful than seeing a child create something and share it with friends, saying “Look at this! Isn’t this brilliant? Do you want to play my game?” That’s the ultimate goal for every coding lesson. To encourage peer review and sharing. We see that a lot with Discovery Education Coding, and it’s lovely.

Posted in Success StoryTagged Discovery Education, Discovery Education Coding

Learning to code with purpose

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Hannah Tudor, Headteacher of St Mary of Charity Primary School in Kent shares her experience of teaching with Discovery Education Coding.

A COMPLETE CODING SOLUTION

We’ve been using Discovery Education Coding for two years. I don’t know how we would teach coding without it. We came across the resources after deciding to give our pupils focused computing time. Our staff had limited experience of coding and I was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to train teachers quickly enough. We chose Discovery Education Coding because it offers a complete solution. It was a quick and instant fix.

ACCELERATING PUPIL PROGRESS

Before using Discovery Education Coding some of our pupils were behind where they needed to be. Our teachers didn’t have the expertise to progress pupils in a structured way, so we were delighted to find that Discovery Education Coding could do this for us. The catch-up units helped us to upskill our pupils quickly and boost their confidence. It also gave us the right resources to move lessons along at a pace that worked for everybody. Today’s children are technologically savvy, but their experience is often limited to hand-held devices. They can use a console, but they don’t know how to build a game of their own. Discovery Education Coding closes the gap. It gives teachers the tools to develop pupils’ knowledge and skills.

EASY TO TEACH

Discovery Education Coding is very easy to teach. The resources are so good that each lesson runs itself. Short videos show what’s needed and demonstrate programming to children in a way that they can easily understand. And if a pupil has a question, staff don’t need to worry about not knowing the answer. The resources help children to problem solve independently. Programming is a skill that was dropped into primary schools suddenly, but Discovery Education Coding helped us to meet this challenge. It completely underpins our computing curriculum and boosts teacher confidence.

FUN TO LEARN

The children love Discovery Education Coding. They enjoy building their own apps and games and sharing the finished result. The rocket and golf games are firm favourites. Our pupils got to grips with the simplicity of Discovery Education Coding very quickly. We knew that they would be able to use it confidently. They just took off!

BUILDING TRANSFERRABLE SKILLS

The resource has helped our pupils to develop their computational thinking skills. But the biggest thing for me is that these skills are often transferrable, particularly debugging. The debugging process of reviewing and thinking about why a program hasn’t worked benefits other areas of the children’s work. For example, in writing, where we talk about the need to go back and edit. Discovery Education Coding has developed this as a universal skill for pupils, because they can instantly see if something has gone wrong. The evaluation aspect is powerful.

PROGRESS WITH PURPOSE

The Discovery Education Coding resources enable us to show real progress in terms of the skills children build. With each new unit pupils refresh and build upon these. They also push themselves a little further, collaborating while learning from each other. What we love most about Discovery Education Coding is that each lesson builds into something. The children create a program that they can share and celebrate. This outcome for me is very powerful. Our pupils aren’t just learning lots of random coding skills, they are learning to code with purpose.

CONSISTENT AND COST-EFFECTIVE

Discovery Education Coding is a consistent resource and it works! It involves very little input from our ICT subject lead because it doesn’t change. Its a constant. As a leader this is invaluable. There are no unexpected surprises. It’s a complete solution and very cost effective. It’s also intuitive and the children make great progress using it. Our teachers rely upon it, why would we change it?

Posted in Success StoryTagged Discovery Education, Discovery Education Coding

Helping every child achieve with Discovery Education Coding

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Martyn Ode, Level 3 Teaching Assistant and Computing Lead at St Oswald’s Catholic Primary School in Wigan, shares his experience of teaching with Discovery Education Coding.

CODING FOR KS1 AND KS2

We’ve been using Discovery Education Coding for five years, and Discovery Education Espresso for even longer. As the lead teacher for Computing I needed a resource to use in every class across every year group. Discovery Education Coding does that. It engages pupils of all ages.

ENHANCING COMPUTING LESSONS

Each class has weekly designated computing time, and Discovery Education Coding is a big part of this. I like the step-by-step lessons and videos which introduce the children to block coding, and then allow them to create their own games and apps. I’m passionate about the internet and technology and it’s great to see the children using screens in such a positive way. The content really engages them.

ENGAGING ALL ABILITIES

Discovery Education Coding is brilliant for pupils of all abilities. We don’t need to differentiate our teaching or put the children into ability groups. The content is very accessible and encourages pupils to work together. I love the sense of pride that our lower ability pupils feel when they create something amazing. Some of these children might struggle to approach a written task in English or Maths, but the visual instructions in coding are more accessible. Every child matters and coding allows every child to achieve!

OFFLINE CODING ACTIVITIES

I often use offline coding activities to bring computing concepts to life. There are lots of great examples of these in the lesson plans. The Jam Sandwich Algorithm is a favourite. To help the children understand that all computer programs are a sequence of instructions, I ask them to write an algorithm which programs me to prepare a jam sandwich. I make the sandwich in class according to their instructions. It’s great fun and they learn from their mistakes –or bugs –as we go along. I’ve also asked the children to create their own dance by writing an algorithm to map out each move. They use tiddlywinks to represent the dancers and debug the choreography before performing it for real.

BUILDING CROSS CURRICULAR SKILLS

Discovery Education Coding helps our pupils to build lots of different skills. It’s totally cross curricular. Their computational thinking skills have improved as has their ability to focus. Many pupils find it easier to concentrate on screens than books. Coding just engages them. It’s also great for teamwork. You’d imagine that coding is something pupils might do on their own, but I always encourage the children to work in groups. They write the code and then work together to debug and fine tune their game or app. Peer feedback helps them to improve. There’s nothing better than when they put together the instructions for a game and click ‘Run’ to watch the finished product. They are so excited by what they have achieved!

BOOSTING NUMERACY

As well as boosting computational skills and focus, Discovery Education Coding helps our pupils with maths. The whole process of programming builds skills in counting, calculation, position, direction and more. The game timers also help the children to learn about time. I’ll often ask them to convert seconds to minutes, or to explain how the timer is working.

ENCOURAGING TEACHER CONFIDENCE

Teaching primary coding can be daunting, but Discovery Education Coding really simplifies things. The videos are so helpful for teachers. You can watch the clips to get up to speed before you deliver each lesson. Our teachers have been surprised at how quickly they have picked it up. It has really improved their confidence as non-computing specialists. They can just switch on their laptop and be ready to deliver a coding lesson.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE

Coding is such an important skill. Technology has changed dramatically and as teachers we need to prepare children because they are the programmers of the future. I love to see how positively they react in coding lessons and I get emotional when I see what they can achieve. The best thing for me about Discovery Education Coding is that it covers all abilities. It’s 100% child friendly and grabs every pupil’s attention. It lets them believe: “I can do this!”

Posted in Success StoryTagged Discovery Education, Discovery Education Coding

Coding the future with Discovery Education

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Award-winning primary school St Swithun Wells uses Discovery Education Coding to teach the National Computing Curriculum in KS1 and KS2. Computing Coordinator Tiffany Bolton explains how the service helps students to build a love of coding and gets them ready for future success.

CODING CONFIDENCE

We’ve been using Discovery Education Coding for seven years and it just keeps getting better. When we first started out, we needed a solution which could be used by teachers who weren’t familiar with programming. Discovery Education Coding was ideal because anybody can pick it up and teach with it. In the last seven years, our confidence in coding has really grown and the service has grown with us, adding new programming languages and features along the way. Today it gives us more choice than ever when it comes to planning lessons.

PREPARATION FOR SECONDARY SCHOOL

We’ve just completed our first full cycle of learning, with students who have come all the way up through the school using Discovery Education Coding. They progressed from using simple block coding in KS1 to more complex HTML in KS2. This gave them a really solid grounding. A student who recently moved up to High School said, “Thank you for your coding lessons, they were amazing! I know exactly what I’m doing in Computing, because I’ve heard it all before!” It’s great that our students are applying the skills they learned with us in secondary school.

LOVED BY PUPILS

Our students absolutely love Discovery Education Coding. At the start of every Computing lesson they ask, “Is it coding today?” and they’re disappointed if it’s not! They enjoy using the platform because it’s simple and engaging. They can write their own code and bring it to life using the fun characters. It also gives them the freedom to do things themselves and come up with their own ideas. We use Rate My App and they love sharing and playing each other’s games and providing feedback. It supports peer learning and it’s fun!

SCAFFOLDED LEARNING

Discovery Education Coding is well scaffolded to deliver progress. We can see our students improving with every lesson and building their confidence. Each unit is broken down into bite sized chunks so it’s not too overwhelming and it works for everyone. The service enables us to meet the needs of a wide range of learners, including lower ability pupils and SEN students. With each step they learn a new coding skill and if they need to revisit a level, it’s easy to do so. We feel confident that everyone is fully supported.

CROSS-CURRICULAR

We’ve always used Discovery Education Coding as a cross curricular tool, linking Computing to other subjects. When the children create games, for example, they use Art and Design skills. The directional language they learn in coding links to Geography and Maths. And the characters and stories they make link to Literacy. The logical thought process of coding helps pupils to plan their work in other subjects. It introduces the concept that there is an end goal in every lesson, a result to plan towards. Coding gives children a real sense of achievement, because there is always a finished product – even if it’s just one line of code, they are successful.

SUPPORT FOR TEACHERS

The platform provides excellent support for teachers. Sometimes primary school teachers can lack confidence in computing, but this is a complete resource which allows them to teach with confidence, even if they don’t know anything about coding! There are lots of helpful videos and lesson plans which cover the learning objectives, success criteria and key questions to ask students. As curriculum leader, I feel confident that my subject is being taught extremely well because we are using Discovery Education Coding. It also makes coding an easy teach because the students love it so much!

TRANSFERRABLE SKILLS

The service is well thought out in terms of the skills it delivers. It offers a really strong foundation, embedding coding skills that children can easily transfer in the future. We notice how it helps with pupils’ logical thinking and reasoning. When the children come across a problem they debug it, reasoning out where the code or instruction might have gone wrong and finding a new solution. Whatever job you have in life you always have to go through problem solving and logical thinking. The skills we are teaching them through coding, will set them up for any profession.

CODING THE FUTURE

It’s so important that we teach children to code, because coding is the future! Today’s students are already tech savvy, but coding gives them a new dimension. It helps them to understand how apps and games work. It’s like telling them a magic secret! Lots of my students say, “I want to code when I grow up”, and Discovery Education Coding has inspired this. They’re excited by coding and talk about it constantly, which can only be a good thing. It’s opened doors to new possibilities and given them a sense of “I can do this!”

THE COMPLETE PACKAGE

Discovery Education Coding is the complete package. Anybody can pick it up and teach it, and the support is there if you need it. The fact that we have used it for seven years is testament to how good this product is. We even picked up a prestigious ICT Innovation Award along the way! The children are the driving force behind our commitment to coding because they still absolutely love it, and this enthuses and motivates our teachers. Best of all, we know that we’re equipping today’s young learners for the future.

Posted in Success StoryTagged Discovery Education, Discovery Education Coding

Getting ready for digital careers with Discovery Education Coding

The Bramham and Shadwell Federation consists of two large primary schools, serving Wetherby and Shadwell in the city of Leeds. Computing Lead and Associate SENco Beth Ings explains how the programme brings coding to life while getting students ready for digital careers.

MEETING THE CURRICULUM

We’ve been using Discovery Education Coding across our two primary schools for three years and are very happy with it. When I became Computing Lead, I was keen to continue our subscription because it hits so many curriculum targets. It’s popular with students because it’s enjoyable and engaging. And with teachers, because you don’t have to be an expert to use it.

A COMPLETE RESOURCE

Discovery Education Coding is very easy for teachers to deliver, regardless of their Computing experience. It’s a complete scheme of work with step by step lesson plans. There are simple videos to guide you through each stage and the lesson objectives are set out very clearly. Before taking over as Computing Lead I lacked confidence but now I can teach Coding up to Year 6. I know that my colleagues feel well supported too.

ACCESSIBLE AND INCLUSIVE

One of the best things about Discovery Education Coding is that it gives children a concrete experience of using technology in a really positive way. It encourages teachers and students to work together and is very inclusive. So, rather than giving the children iPads and sending them away to code, we work alongside them. Each lesson is clearly planned out with teaching and talking points in every step. It’s also very accessible and meets the needs of different types of learners.

RESILIENCE AND PROBLEM SOLVING

The programme helps students with problem solving, which is a key aim of the National Computing Curriculum. We really like the debugging aspect and the way in which it encourages students to fix their code using sequencing, selection and repetition. Through logical reasoning, they learn how to unpick and correct algorithms. This builds resilience, which is such an important skill and something we try to encourage across the school.

A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING

Recently, our Local Authority did a mock deep dive into our Computing provision and they loved how we use Discovery Education Coding. They were particularly impressed that our students use the right terminology, because it’s constantly being reinforced in their lessons. They asked our students to explain variables and algorithms and they were able to reel off the answers! The programme helps us to embed the right terminology and build a deeper understanding.

LOVED BY STUDENTS

Our students absolutely love Discovery Education Coding. Parents tell us that they enjoy accessing it at home and will sometimes choose Coding over gaming! I think it appeals to children because of the work behind it, the sequencing. They enjoy learning about how games are put together and putting this into practice. It’s not just about problem solving, it’s creative too. They can showcase their learning by creating apps and games and this gives them a real sense of achievement.

FREE CODE FUN

One of our favourite activities is Burst The Bubbles, a fun game where children learn how to program bubbles to float and pop. Our students love to code their own version of the game before sharing it with their peers. They’re learning from each other all the time and as teachers, we learn from them too. If I’m not sure how to debug a piece of code, I’ll stop the class and ask the children to play teacher to help me!

STUDENT PROGRESSION

This year we’ve delivered clear whole school progression in Computing, thanks to the scaffolded learning support that Discovery Education provides. We have more students ‘meeting’ or ‘working above’ than ever before. Because each unit is broken down into bite-sized chunks, students can master skills in their own time. Each lesson plan clearly scaffolds into the next and it’s easy to revisit more challenging tasks if we need to. There’s also a handy Refresher Course, which recaps learning.

DIGITAL FUTURES

Having fun with coding is so important and because the platform is so engaging, our students can’t wait to use it. It’s helping them to build transferrable skills and has really sparked their interest in IT. When we ask our students what they want to be, they often say that they want to work in technology. Discovery Education Coding is getting them ready for digital careers and opening doorways to the future.

Posted in Success StoryTagged Discovery Education, Discovery Education Coding

Building collaboration and problem solving skills

Simon Haughton, Computing Lead at Parkfield Primary School in Rochdale, shares his experience of teaching with Discovery Education Coding and explains how the all-in-one resource delivers clear pupil progress and value for money.

A COMPLETE CODING RESOURCE

I’ve been using Discovery Education Coding since its launch seven years ago. I chose it because it was a complete coding resource and compatible with our iPads. I liked the fact that you can easily change the amount of command blocks offered according to age and ability. The templates for children to create programs are differentiated between year groups, which is great. These give me an ideal starting point to plan lessons that are varied and show progression in coding skills for the children as they move up through the school.

COST EFFECTIVE

Discovery Education Coding is very cost-effective as I use it for the majority of programming lessons from years 1 to 6, which is about a third of my overall curriculum time. This provides pupils with a consistent environment in which they can build on their skill set each year and makes their retrieval ability to interact with it as accessible as possible. The interface is perfectly designed for primary-aged pupils. It allows them to learn how to create programs using an increasing range of command blocks as they move up through the school, whilst not confusing them with unnecessary commands in the way that other block-based programming software does.

PROGRAMMING BASICS

I use Discovery Education Coding in almost every programming lesson. I deliver these in iPads which children have 1-1 access to, as part of whole class PPA cover each week. Discovery Education Coding gives the children a strong programming backbone that they can build upon as they progress through school. It also neatly complements other coding resources such as Lego robots, floor turtles etc.

MEETING THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

The resource has really helped me to meet National Curriculum Computing requirements. It offers lots of suggestions which I use for planning lessons. I can follow steps for creating games in different year groups which is extremely helpful, or I can ask children to use the ‘Free Code’ screen if they want to program an app of their choosing. My pupils love having the freedom to create games based on their own imaginative ideas, as well as having the chance to share and play each other’s too.

A CHILD-FRIENDLY SPACE

Discovery Education Coding gives my pupils a child-friendly space to program fun games and apps. They can access it from any web browser across a multitude of devices–even beyond the school gate. By providing a grid-style design stage and a clip art gallery of pictures to include, children can effortlessly create their own programs.

My pupils have developed a wide range of skills including sequencing commands and using variables such as game timers or score counters. I’ve also been able to use Discovery Education Coding to teach children how to use co-ordinates and data properties in their programs, such as setting an object’s speed or heading.

HANDS-ON LEARNING

With Discovery Education Coding, our computing lessons are always engaging. Recently I asked our Year 2 pupils to design a scene in which the player had to control a character to reach a destination whilst staying on a wiggly pathway and avoiding a baddy. This gave them the opportunity to showcase the skills associated with using button click events to control the movement and animation of objects they had been learning in previous lessons.

The pupils designed some fantastic game ideas – a knight trying to reach a princess avoiding a nasty dragon, a whale trying to catch a fish avoiding a hungry shark and an astronaut trying to get to their spaceship whilst avoiding an evil alien! I challenged them to edit and improve their programs to make the games more interesting, such as by: adding a ‘Level 2’ button to make the baddy move or by showing a big ‘Well done!’ message when their target image is clicked on. I was particularly impressed with how independently they worked to code and debut them, as well as how relatively detailed some of their projects’ codes were to make the final games really fun to play!

PUPIL PROGRESSION

Discovery Education Coding has helped my Year 2 class to develop the programming skills they gained in Year 1, progressing from simply clicking on objects to make them move to adding buttons. As their confidence has grown, I’m now able to let them have more freedom in designing their own themed designs, as well as stretching more able pupils. I ask them to take screenshots of their work to insert into a Word document and type a couple of sentences alongside describing the aim of their programs and a short evaluation. As they move into Year 3, I’ll build on these skills by teaching how to program conditional events that cause events to happen, such as when an object hits another object (e.g. to collect or ‘eat’ it) or a particular colour in a scene (e.g. to stop moving when a wall is touched).

COMPUTATIONAL THINKING SKILLS

Discovery Education Coding is a brilliant tool for encouraging pupils to develop their computational thinking skills, both during the creation of apps and in the testing phase. Through its colourful graphical user interface children can easily:

• Explore different game design ideas
• Visually see the sequence in which commands are being executed and how this matches with their chosen algorithm
• Break down their code into different events
• Try out different values in the numerical command blocks and adjust these until the desired results are created.

Coding really encourages my pupils to collaborate. They help one another, share interesting lines of code, test out each other’s games and share feedback. The children often approach and solve programming issues in completely different ways to how I’d imagined in my planning. It really is a joy to discover their solutions –which show what great potential Discovery Education Coding has with a little bit of tinkering!

Recently a Year 4 pupil showed me that a variable with a starting value of 60, reducing by one every second, can be used as an on-screen countdown timer. I thought this was a simple but very neat idea!

SUPPORTING TEACHERS

For me, Discovery Education is a brilliant online coding programming service that is very cost effective. I find it very simple to use. It has clearly been designed especially for primary schools. It allows children to independently create a wide variety of apps and games and provides teachers with amazing lesson plans. It has enabled me to cover all aspects of the Computing National Curriculum and has given the children in my school a firm introduction to programming. I’m confident that this will enable them to excel when they transition to secondary school!

Posted in Success StoryTagged Discovery Education, Discovery Education Coding