New Guide launched for Post Primary Schools: Computing at School

This new guide looks at computing and the Northern Ireland Curriculum. It introduces the key concepts to help teachers in post-primary schools in Northern Ireland provide opportunities for their pupils to develop skills in computing and coding.

It supports teachers from a broad range of backgrounds who want to understand the best ways to deliver computing and computational thinking within the context of their own subject area.

The information and support will help you plan Exploring Programming activities that incorporate the Explore, Express and Evaluate elements of Using ICT: to 'investigate, make predictions and solve problems through interaction with digital tools'. While it includes some detail on the key concepts of computing, much of the guide emphasises computational thinking, strategies and lesson ideas that can be used in the classroom. Computational thinking as defined in this guide also overlaps extensively with the Northern Ireland Curriculum requirements to develop pupils' Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities.

The guide comes in two parts - Part One introduces key concepts in computational thinking and computing. Also published as a separate guide for use in primary schools, it provides the foundations for the more advanced approaches that follow in Part Two. Unless post-primary teachers are already proficient in computational thinking and computing, we recommend that they read Part One first.

The content has been adapted for the Northern Ireland Curriculum from Berry, M., QuickStart Computing: a CPD toolkit for primary teachers, Swindon: BCS and Woodman, A., QuickStart Computing: a CPD toolkit for secondary teachers, Swindon: BCS.