Teaching Computing Unplugged in Primary Schools

Exploring primary computing through practical activities away from the computer

Helen Caldwell, Neil Smith, Helen Caldwell, Neil Smith, Author

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781473961708
  9781473961692
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473988224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Teaching primary computing without computers?

The Computing curriculum is a challenge for primary school teachers.  The realities of primary school resources mean limited access to computer hardware.  But computing is about more than computers. Important aspects of the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science can be taught without any hardware.  Children can learn to analyse problems and computational terms and apply computational thinking to solve problems without turning on a computer.

This book shows you how you can teach computing through 'unplugged' activities. It provides lesson examples and everyday activities to help teachers and pupils explore computing concepts in a concrete way, accelerating their understanding and grasp of key ideas such as abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation. The unplugged approach is physical and collaborative, using kinaesthetic learning to help make computing concepts more meaningful and memorable.

This book will help you to elevate your teaching, and your children?s learning of computing beyond the available hardware.  It focuses on the building blocks of understanding required for computation thinking. 

Chapter 1 Robots

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

Ted Nelson

Introduction

This chapter is all about learning through action. We suggest that children make and execute programs with their bodies and their voices: jumping, skipping, climbing, crawling and yelling instructions. Instead of programming being trapped behind a glass computer screen, they will learn some fundamental computing concepts by working with real human robots. Our activities encourage children to work in teams to develop sequences of commands and then test them out on each other by role-playing robot movements. The idea is that cementing the computing concepts through fun hands-on kinaesthetic experiences will help to transfer them to written code scenarios.

Programming is about giving clear instructions and having someone or something carry them out. Robots are good things to program because it is easy to watch the program being executed in real life and then to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm. People can make good robots because they can interpret (and misinterpret) natural language instructions. Their misinterpretations can add a good deal of humour to a lesson and make the process of debugging entertaining and memorable. Human robots are also readily available in a classroom for no additional cost.

The physical world is a safe and accessible place to play with lines of code, make mistakes and rearrange sequences of instructions. This makes it easier to develop computational thinking skills without technology getting in the way. By programming each other, children are supporting through collaboration, reinforcing the fact that coding can be an engaging problem-solving activity and that it can even take place in the playground.

As your pupils develop their programs, they will recognise the need for instructions to be clear and precise, at the appropriate level of detail and sufficiently flexible to deal with different but related situations. You will be helping them to understand that computing is about logical and creative problem solving. You will also be developing their ability to talk about the ways in which they are applying computational thinking skills to devise workable solutions.

Importantly, when children see how their routines work in the physical world, it often happens that they spontaneously reinvent more complex algorithmic structures such as repetition and selection. They may naturally introduce repeat loops (iterative statements) and decision making using if-then sentences (conditional statements) into the sequences of instructions for their human robots. Finding out about these logical processes for themselves rather than just being told about them is a powerful learning opportunity. If they make these discoveries while composing their own algorithms, they understand the concepts more deeply and are likely to be able to transfer them to other problem-solving situations.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this chapter you should be able to:

• specify the operations that can be used to perform a task and assemble them into an algorithm
• design and lead a computing unplugged activity for your class that helps children to understand that programmers need to write precise sequences of instructions;
• identify and build upon children's natural use of computing concepts such as loops and decision making in the context of programming human robots.

Links to Teachers’ Standards

The following Teachers’ Standards are particularly relevant to this chapter:

• TS2d Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how pupils learn.
• TS2e Encourage pupils to take a responsible and conscientious attitude to their own work.
• TS3a Have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils’ interest in the subject.
• TS4a Promote a love of learning and children's intellectual curiosity.
• TS4e Contribute to the design and provision of an engaging curriculum.

(DfE, 2011)

Links to National Curriculum Programmes of Study

Key Stage 1

• Understand what algorithms are, how they are implemented as programs on digital devices, and that programs execute by following precise and unambiguous instructions.
• Create and debug simple programs.
• Use logical reasoning to predict the behaviour of simple programs.

Key Stage 2

• Design, write and debug programs that accomplish specific goals, including controlling or simulating physical systems; solve problems by decomposing them into smaller parts.
• Use sequence, selection, and repetition in programs; work with variables and various forms of input and output.
• Use logical reasoning to explain how some simple algorithms work and to detect and correct errors in algorithms and programs.

(DfE, 2013)

Need to Know

Here we will think about the subject knowledge that is relevant to this chapter.

First, it is important for children to understand that computers solve problems by following sets of instructions and that they follow the instructions literally. The set of instructions that solves the problem or completes the task is the algorithm. An algorithm consists of a step-by-step sequence of operations. A program is a particular way of writing an algorithm so that both a human and a computer can understand it. Programs can be written in different languages. For example, ‘Go to your room and eat a banana’ and ‘Geh in dein Zimmer und essen eine Banane’ use different languages to express the same algorithm.

There are many different computer languages but they are all based on the need to give precise and unambiguous instructions. A programming language is a way of coding actions using a limited vocabulary and a symbolic language.

Errors in computer programs are known as bugs, and the story goes that they are named after a moth that was removed from a calculating machine in 1947 (see Figure 1.1). Errors in computer programs can have devastating consequences and so software needs to be tested methodically. The process of evaluating and improving algorithms is known as debugging.

Algorithms sometimes contain choices. Conditional statements (also known as IF statements) direct computers to choose which branch of an algorithm to run. They help computers to make decisions based on the idea that the condition is true or false. In computing, these true or false choices are known as Boolean values. They are similar to many everyday situations, for example ‘IF it is raining THEN put on your coat’. It is easy to find real-life examples of conditional statements during the school day, such as taking the register or lining up for playtime.

We can also repeat sections of algorithms. Iteration statements are also known as REPEAT statements, WHILE statements, or FOR statements. They tell the computer to loop over the same set of instructions. Sometimes we use loops just to make the program simpler (‘REPEAT 5; step forward’ versus ‘step forward; step forward; step forward; step forward; step forward’). Sometimes we use loops to make part of an algorithm run a different number of times depending on the situation. Again, we can think of real-life examples ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Computing Unplugged
• Chapter 1 Robots
• Chapter 2 Musicians
• Chapter 3 Artists
• Chapter 4 Explorers
• Chapter 5 Code Breakers: Dpef Csfblfst
• Chapter 6 Magicians
• Chapter 7 Gamers
• Chapter 8 Cooks
• Chapter 9 Scientists
• Index