Giffard Park Primary School
Computing at Giffard Park Primary School
The subject leader for Computing is Mrs Cronin.
At Giffard Park Primary School we want pupils to be MASTERS of technology. Technology is everywhere and will play a pivotal part in students' lives. Therefore, we want to model and educate our pupils on how to use technology positively, responsibly and safely. We want our pupils to be creators not consumers and our broad curriculum encompassing computer science, information technology and digital literacy reflects this.
Please view our Intent, Implementation, Impact document for an in depth look at our Computing aims.
What does the Computing Curriculum look like?
The National Curriculum for Computing aims to ensure that all pupils:
- can understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation
- can analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems
- can evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems
- are responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.
At Giffard Park Primary School, we achieve this through using the NCCE Computing scheme as a foundation.
Computing Highlights
A group of Year 5 children went to Cranfield University for the awards ceremony of the BCS Computing coding competition in July. They were able to see a range of the entries to the competition, collect their medals, visit an aircraft hanger and eat some cake. Thank you to all the children for representing the school so well and for all the adults who supported them. They are looking forward to entering again in Year 6!
Foundation / Year 1
Our young programmers have been using Scratch Jr to be introduced to sprites, backgrounds and motion. They have been making the sprite move in different directions across the page by ordering programming blocks.
Year 2
The children in Year 2 have been exploring how music through our 'Making Music' topic in computing. They have been using music lab to explore how pitch, dynamics and different instruments can make us think and feel different things. They have even used the software to create music to sound like an animal.
If you would like to have a go, please click the following link: Chrome Music Lab
Year 3
In Year 3, they have been creating our own stop-start animations about the Romans using the iMotion app on iPads. They began by creating flip books using post-it notes, then designed their animations as a story board before creating the final animation. They then learnt to move our characters a small about each time and to keep the camera in the same position to be more accurate.
Year 4
In Year 4, they have been learning about photo editing. As part of this learning, they have looked at fake images, why images might be changed and editing our own images for a purpose. To edit the photos, they used the paint.net program and a range of tools: crop, resize, copy, paste and undo. They also developed our skills of finding images on pixabay, downloading the images and opening and saving the files.
Year 5
Year 5 have been creating their own quizzes on Scratch. They have learnt about selection in programming, conditional statements, operators and debugging (fixing errors). They also developed skills of being able to log into scratch on the Chromebooks, typing and saving our scratch files.
If you would like to create a scratch account to have a go, please click here.
Year 6
Year 6 have been using Micro:Bits to write an algorithm for a step counter. They had to use sensing, forever loops, debug our code and make improvements to be successful. They also developed skills of typing, connecting or Micro:bit to the Chromebook through Bluetooth and successfully downloading our projects onto the Micro:bit.
To have a go at programming a Micro:bit (no Micro:bit necessary), please follow this link: Make Code
