Computer Programming in the Primary School - week 8

Notes taken from textbook, chapter 17 - Computer Programming in the primary school 
Rory McGann and Aisling Leavy

Although everyone now days can play games on their phones etc wouldn't it be great to be able to harness the power of technology to create meaningful educational challenges and in turn stimulated and develop higher order reasoning abilities. This is why computer programming is now being introduced into primary schools.

• People construct new knowledge when engaged in constructing something meaningful. If students are learning to programme and construct artefacts they are engaging in self-directed learning therefor creating new knowledge

Game design:

Hayes and Games (2008) identify four goals that motivate the focus on game design

• to help students develop programming skills
• under-representation of females in maths and science has stimulated interest in developing game design environments of interest to females
• the use of games has been shown to enhance learning in academic domains such as science, maths, history, language and literacy
• the need to equip pupils with skills to participate in a knowledge economy has precipitated the focus on 'design thinking'. 

These gaming environments promote ongoing learning opportunities, support the development of computational thinking and systems thinking which in turn develops problem solving and design based reasoning. 

Findings about students from programming in school program

• students work collaboratively each adding their different strengths
• students learn't to use and incorporate multimedia functions
• opened up possibilities for future career paths
• students learnt to draw on others expertise if they were stuck

Observations from student teachers about the programming in school program

• stimulated a sense of wonder and curiosity among pupils
• eagerness to learn
• full of questions and wanted to move on to new areas
• experimentation in regards to programming
• it encouraged higher order thinking by giving class a chance to experiment, summarise, analyse, make inferences and deductions
• it challenged the students to suggest solutions to problems and make informed judgements supported by logical thinking and problem solving skills
• promoted collaboration in the process, helped them learn from each other and praise each other

Pedagogy

• questioning (able to see what students have learnt, what they found easy/hard0
• balance is needed between teacher-talk, pupil engagement and structured tasks
• pair work, collaboration and mixed ability groups would work in this scenario