Computer Science
Subject intent
As Steve Jobs said, “everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think”.
Students develop their computational thinking skills; these skills develop students’ abilities to think logically through problems by identifying and creating their own algorithms, realising that a big problem is actually a set of small problems by applying decomposition and stripping down complexity by abstracting out the key elements. These skills are transferable skills that allow students to think more critically and logically about problems. In turn these skills empower students to write and debug programs using sequence, selection and iteration.
We look under the hood of devices, gaining an understanding of how a computer works via electronic impulses represented by binary, how these simple 1s and 0s can represent the photograph of a favourite picture and how those same impulses are sent via wires, through the air and across the world to read this.
Brief overview of thinking behind curriculum cumulation and progression
We deliver a computing curriculum with elements of computer science, digital literacy and information technology. The curriculum is sequenced so that key knowledge is introduced in year 7, allowing these strands to be revisited and built upon in the consecutive years. This interleaving is in place to allow students to develop robust schema to conceptualise the abstract learning inherent in the curriculum. The chief thinking skills we’re striving to develop in our students are computational thinking skills around decomposition, abstraction and algorithmic thinking.
KS4 spec
Curriculum plan
