Tag Archives: CAS – Computing At School

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CPD day for London computing teachers at the CAS London annual conference

Teaching London Computing’s Paul Curzon and William Marsh will be presenting at the CPD day for London computing teachers at this year’s CAS London conference, £25 for London teachers, £60 for those outside London (BOOK TICKETS). Read on for more information…

Sat 27 Feb

When: Saturday 27th February
Where: London (Gladesmore Community School, Crowland Rd, N15 6EB)
Tickets: £25 (London), £60 (elsewhere) – BOOK HERE
Event flyer: DOWNLOAD and please share with colleagues

Approximate timings of Paul’s and William’s sessions (note timings may change by +/- 10mins).

Paul Curzon
Unplugged Sorting algorithms – 10:00pm
Using Magic to teach computing – 2:30pm

William Marsh
Python Advanced GUI – 12:30pm
LMC 1 – Introduction Afternoon – 2:30pm

Here’s the information from CAS London about the conference –

CAS London’s Regional Conference, a day of CPD for primary and secondary teachers of computing

For those who need to gain confidence to teach programming, those who are brushing up on skills and those looking to find out about recent developments in computer science education.

HANDS ON Workshops, ready to use resources.

  • Select 4 x hour long workshops from 7 workstreams of  more than 28 workshops.
  • Introductory and advanced programming on Scratch, Kodu, Python, Visual Basic, LMC, Java and more.
  • Pedagogy, assessment, exam boards,  magic to teach algorithms, computational thinking, unplugged sorting …
  • Introductory physical computing with BBC Micro:bit, Raspberry Pi and Engduino.
  • Cross curriclar Maths and Scratch, DT and Crumbles.
  • Workshops led by Paul Curzon, Phil Bagge, Mark Dorling, Sue Sentance, Michael Kölling, Rob Leeman (OCR), Matt Walker (AQA) and many other leading CPD providers.

Nominal charge to cover lunch and admin.

We are funded by the Department for Education to support teachers in London, hence the reduced fee for London educators.

Teachers from further afield are very welcome, as are educators working with CLCs, boroughs and Coding Clubs.

Trainee teachers and University/ITT representatives are most welcome and also invited to attend.

At lunch time there will be a market place where voluntary groups, industry and other suppliers will be on hand to share their resources and ideas on careers, coding clubs, ed tech products etc.

If you would like to showcase at the market place please contact jane.waite@computingatschool.org.uk

About CAS London
CAS London, the Computing At School regional centre for London, is run by King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London. It co-ordinates CAS activity in London, supporting teachers of Computing through CAS Master Teachers, Hubs and Lead Schools.
Find out more about CAS and CAS London.

 

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New course date: A-level Computing CPD for London teachers – Wed 7 Oct, 10-week course

We will be running our A-level Computing CPD course again this Autumn for London teachers.

The course will run for 10 weeks from 5pm to 7.30pm on Wednesday evenings from 7 October to 16 December 2015 with a half-term break on Wednesday 28 October (ie a 10 week course running within an 11-week timeframe) in the ITL Building, Queen Mary University of London.

As always the course costs £300 but those teaching in London can take advantage of a 50% reduction thanks to funding from the Mayor of London, ie £150. In addition, with support from the new CAS London hub, we are also making FREE places available for London Master teachers only – please note that we will be requesting evidence of Master Teacher status before confirming your free place. The course will be taught by William Marsh and Trevor Bragg.

Full information and guide syllabus on our A-level Computing page, and there are some quick links to register below. Any questions? Contact Jo (j.brodie@qmul.ac.uk) for more.

Next course(s): 10-week Wednesday evening course: 7 October to 16 December 2015 (half-term 28 October 2015), 5.00pm to 7.30pm. For this course we are making free places available for London Master Teachers (you will be sent an application for to confirm your eligibility).

Eventbrite - A-level Computing CPD - Teaching London Computing & CAS London for a place on A-level Computing CPD – Teaching London Computing & CAS London

Please sign-up to be kept informed of future courses.

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Launch event for the new CAS London Regional Centre (Computing At School) – Fri 10th July

Queen Mary University of London and King’s College London will be involved in running the new CAS London Regional Centre (this is separate from Teaching London Computing project but many of the same people are involved). There will be a launch event [free] from 4.30pm on Friday 10 July and the invitation and details are below. [Eventbrite link for the meeting]

Find out more about CAS London @cas_london_crc.

Here is a map of the CAS regional hubs and Computing at School‘s website, and they’re @CompAtSch on Twitter.

We would like to invite you to the first CAS London Meeting. This is a regional collaboration bringing together primary and secondary teachers, Computing At School master teachers, hub leaders, lead schools, universities, boroughs and other training groups and interested parties to promote and support computing education in London. The meeting aims to start a discussion of how we can best mutually support each other, further developing our London education computing community.

The twilight event is on Friday 10th July 2015, at King’s College London.

Here is the link to eventbrite invitation.

Outline:

  • 4:30 Networking tasks & refreshments
  • 5:30 Keynote speaker Simon Humphreys
  • 5:45 Contributed presentations: What’s happening in London?
  • 6:30 Working together: Tasks
  • 7:00 Finish – more refreshments and networking

We aim to explore three questions about computing CPD and teaching computing in London schools: What is working well? What help do you need? What can you offer others?

If possible, can you create 1 or 2 slides with your answers to the above questions and send them to us. We will share your slides on a rolling display during the networking sessions and ask a number of contributors to talk through their slides in the contributed presentations session (maximum of 4 minutes per presentation).

Join us to celebrate the work done by our fantastic community of computing educators (that’s you) and to find out how we can further grow and develop the network of support and computing CPD provision across London.

For more information and to share your slides please contact Jane (jane.waite@computingatschool.org.uk) or Trevor (trevor.bragg@computingatschool.org.uk)

Many thanks
Paul Curzon, William Marsh, Jane Waite, Trevor Bragg, Sue Sentance

The CAS London meeting is supported by ‘Computing at School’ and ‘Teaching London Computing’, which is funded by the Mayor of London and Department for Education. The meeting is being organised by London’s CAS Regional Centre (CRC) a collaboration between Queen Mary University of London and King’s College London.’

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Paul Curzon from @QMUL and @cs4fn has been making faces at #casneconf :)

Paul Curzon gave a talk at the Computing At School North East conference this morning and judging from the tweets (see below) it seems that people enjoyed themselves. Paul uses magic and audience participation to demonstrate fun and easy ways of introducing programming topics into the classroom and delivers a series of free workshops for London teachers.

(More tweets from the #casneconf below)

If you’re enjoying his talk and wondering about the resources then the links below should help. We’re posting out printed copies to our subscribers but anyone can download free PDFs of our booklets.

The Magic of Computer Science 3: magic meets mistakes, machines and medicine
magicbookcover3This book is published by cs4fn (Computer Science for Fun) in partnership with Teaching London Computing (TLC) and CHI+MED. TLC is funded by the Mayor of London and additional funding from the Department for Education has enabled us to send copies to schools of this booklet beyond London. It is also supported by Computing At School. Click on the picture for more information.

“The cs4fn magic books are collections of easy to do magic tricks (mainly simple card tricks). The twist is that every trick comes with a link to some computer science too. That means that as you learn the tricks, you will learn something about what computer scientists get up to too.

Magic is a combination of a secret method and a presentation. A computer scientist would call the method an algorithm, and that is all a computer program is too. The presentation corresponds to the interaction design of a program. For a magic trick to delight, you must get both the algorithm and presentation right. The same is true for programs”

Computational thinking: searching to speak
Searching to Speak A5 blueThis booklet was produced as part of the Teaching London Computing activities and has been used in one of our free workshops. It highlights how computational thinking can help people, for example in speeding up tasks, but also focuses on remembering when it’s appropriate to use technological solutions and when it isn’t.

“Computational Thinking: Searching To Speak is a glossy booklet that shows computational thinking in action embedded in a story about helping people with disability, even without technology. It shows how the separate elements of computational thinking combine in interdisciplinary problem solving. Along the way it teaches some core search algorithms. It is written by Paul Curzon of Queen Mary University of London based on the cs4fn approach.”

Click on the picture to download a copy of the PDF, or read more about it and also see how it’s used in the workshop.

The Create-A-Face activity

IMG_0942 - Paul Curzon at CASneconfIn the picture on the left (taken by Sue Sentance at the CAS NE Conference) Paul Curzon is instructing members of the audience to create a face whose expression can be programmed with simple instructions.

“Explore programming by making an affective (relating to moods and emotions) robot face out of card, tubes and students. Program it to react to different kinds of sounds (nasty, nice or sudden) and show different emotions (sad, happy, surprised). Then think up some other facial expressions and program rules to make the face respond to sounds with the new expressions.”

Download everything you need (apart from the cardboard tubes!) to recreate this in your classroom, from our Create-A-Face Activity page.

Tweets from the Computing At School North East Conference about Paul Curzon’s talk

The tweets above refer to the Searching to Speak booklet and the one below to the latest magic book. Most of the final tweets refer to the Create A Face activity.

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Computing At School (CAS) community survey – open now

Pinched from the CAS e-newsletter…

National CAS Survey 2015
01 Feb 2015

Cas-logo_bcs

Computing At School and the Network of Excellence team are conducting a short survey about the Computing At School community and Computing in schools.

National CAS Survey 2015

The survey will remain open for the whole of February 2014. To get an accurate picture of how CAS is used and how Computing in schools is developing, we would like as many CAS members as possible to complete this. The survey is open to all (including non-CAS members), although there are some questions that are specific to members of CAS and some that are specific to teachers. It should not take long to complete.

For one lucky person each week, there will be a prize of a £25 Amazon voucher!

The summary data will be published by CAS in the spring.

Thank you!

If you’re interested in the teaching of computing in schools (you might be a teacher, a university partner or in industry or just curious) have a look at http://www.computingatschool.co.uk 

Speaking of surveys, we’ve (Teaching London Computing) just published the preliminary results of our own survey which looks at Computing teachers perceptions of their training needs, more at the snappily titled Surveying schools and Computing teachers – do they need training, and if so what format?

Our survey is still open, at http://bit.ly/TLCsurvey2015a

CAS’s survey link is National CAS Survey 2015

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‘Save Santa’ Christmas game in Scratch, shoot the bats that are trying to interfere with his gift delivering :) via @CompAtSch

Computing At School (CAS) is a free resource hub (with info about events and classroom resources) for computer science teachers in the UK. There’s a thriving community section in which people can share their ideas for activities, and one of them is this game ‘Santa Shoot’ game, from Conor Grimes. Players need to shoot down bats that are getting in Santa’s way.

It’s free to become a CAS member and once you’ve done so you’ll be able to access the Scratch game and play it in your classroom.

The game was written in 2012 but thanks to a comment posted more recently the thread has resurfaced.

Game details: Santa Shoot Christmas Game

savesanta

Short description:
Simple Scratch Christmas Activity

Full description:
Key Stage 3 Programming Activity
Level: (Beginner / Intermediate/)
Duration: (1 – 2 Periods)
Teaches: (Basic Scratch programming)

 

 

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Paul Curzon’s workshop at #CASconf2014 (Computing At School conference)

A couple of people have shared YouTube videos and photos of Paul’s workshop at the Birmingham CAS conference this weekend – thank you very much, we’re glad you enjoyed it and here’s a collection of the tweets below.

All the free resources that Paul mentioned in his workshop can be downloaded from our section on Inspiring unplugged classroom resources.

Paul has a few free workshops coming up in London:

 

 

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Round-up of Teaching London Computing’s free workshops, courses – and a CAS hub event

I’ve just emailed this to people who’ve signed up to receive info about our events and thought I’d post it here too.

We’re on Twitter @TeachingLDNComp.

Free workshops
25 June 2014, Hackney
Invisible Palming! Intelligent paper? So what is an algorithm?
4pm, Wednesday 25 June 2014
Cardinal Pole School, 205 Morning Ln, Hackney, London E9 6LG

8 July 2014, New Cross
Prof Paul Curzon will be giving a talk, “Teaching Computing Unplugged to Young Children” for primary school computing teachers on 8 July 2014 at a two-day workshop event at Goldsmiths in London. Please note that registration for this event is via Goldsmiths (given in link).

9 July 2014, Hackney
Programming Unplugged: Learning programming without computers
4pm, Wednesday 9 July 2014
Cardinal Pole School, 205 Morning Ln, Hackney, London E9 6LG

Courses
We have a new short CPD course for GCSE Computing teachers which will take place at KCL from 4-8 August (Mon-Fri) 2014. “Computing CPD GCSE Summer Holiday (1-week intensive)” costs £150 for London teachers (thanks to funding from the Mayor of London) and £300 for those outside London (if space is available).

Other events
Computing At School (CAS) – East London hub meeting, 8 July 2014, 4.30 to 6pm.
This event will take place in Islington at the City & Islington 6th Form College and is free to attend. As well as being a networking event for computing teachers the event will also plan ‘a practical using the Arduino Uno’ and discuss the new CAS document ‘Computing in the National Curriculum – A guide for secondary teachers‘.

 

 

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CAS: 2014 Teacher Conference 21 June 2014 & Teaching Computing CPD Day on 20th, from @CompAtSch

The CAS (Computing At School) Teacher Conference will take place in Birmingham on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 June 2014. The conference itself takes place on the Saturday 21st with a day of teaching CPD happening on Friday 20th.

Tickets and information available from 2014 CAS – Conferences for Teachers of Computing.

2014 CAS – Conference for Teachers of Computing
Computing At School (CAS)
Saturday, June 21, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (BST)
Birmingham, United Kingdom

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For primary school computing teachers: Barefoot Computing website now live & competition

From the Computing At School website’s news page:

Barefoot Computing CAS

 

“The Barefoot Computing project is about helping primary school teachers get ready for the computer science element of the new computing curriculum.”

 
The website is now live at http://barefootcas.org.uk/ and they’re running a competition “for primary school pupils to design a mascot for the Barefoot Computing Project. There are iPads to be won! The closing date is 23rd June and more information can be found here. ”