Computing at School, the Barefoot Project is a new scheme designed to help teachers teach computing successfully.
“The Barefoot Project was established in 2014 with the original aim to help primary school teachers in England get ready for the computer science element of a new computing curriculum. It was originally funded by the DfE and run by BCS in partnership with BT and CAS.
BT took over the lead and funding for the project in 2015, with the continued support of BCS and CAS and now have the aspiration to enable the resources and workshops to be available to ALL primary school teachers throughout the UK.Development of the resources will continue, including introducing SEN resources. There are three main aspects of the Barefoot Computing Project.”(CAS)
There are many exemplar teaching activities created by computing teachers. These are cross curricular and provided freely for teachers who need help with teaching computing.
There is a lot of help for teachers. In one section – called computational thinking concepts – they deal with computational thinking, logic, algorithms, decomposition, patterns abstraction and Evaluation. Each section has downloadable resources, lots of explanatory material and an explanation of where it fits into the Computing Curriculum at each of the primary age sections: 3 – 5, 5-7 and 7 – 11. This section is to help teachers equip themselves with the knowledge about computing that is necessary to be able to teach it successfuly.
There are also freely available workshops, where the materials are introduced to the teaching staff and a school joins the community. The exemplar teaching activities for 5 – 7 year olds includes:
- Safety Snakes, online sharing sweets algorithms, safety and beebots,
- Sharing Sweets Activity: understanding algorithms
- Pizza Pickle Activity: An introduction to debugging Scratch programs, among many others.
For 7 – 11 activities include learning Scratch or Kodu, making a quiz, making an animation, drawing crystal flowers and more.
There is a lot of very useful material here; it is the sort of resource which would make a good set of computing CPD sessions.
