Tag Archives: education

How to rapidly design and adapt quality learning experiences for your students

Post Syndicated from Sean Sayers original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/how-to-rapidly-design-and-adapt-quality-learning-experiences-for-your-students/

At this time of year, many educators are considering ways to update their content ahead of the new school term. Whether you’re a teaching assistant or head of department, it’s important to ensure that the content you’re updating — or even designing anew — is relevant and high quality, and meet learners’ needs. In today’s blog we’re highlighting ‘ABC learning design’, and how it can be used to rapidly design and improve learning experiences.

Educators in the classroom

We also share our new ABC-focused Pedagogy Quick Read, which you can download for free to: 

  • Find practical tips on how to use the ABC process and related approaches with your learners
  • Read a summary of the research behind the framework

What is ABC learning design?

ABC learning design is a rapid, hands-on approach to design and develop blended learning experiences. The framework has traditionally been used at undergrad level, and had a lot of success when used in response to the global pandemic in 2020, when learning experiences had to quickly transition from being delivered in-person to being accessible remotely. 

The model is centred around six learning types:

  • Acquisition: Learning by reading, listening, or watching
  • Collaboration: Learning by working with others towards a common goal, involving co-creation and shared outputs
  • Discussion: Learning through dialogue, sharing ideas, and responding to others
  • Investigation: Learning by exploring, comparing, and evaluating new information or experiences
  • Practice: Learning by applying knowledge and skills, receiving feedback, and refining understanding
  • Production: Learning by expressing understanding or creating something to demonstrate knowledge and skills

Before continuing, it’s important to distinguish between ‘learning types’ and the widely discredited concept of ‘learning styles’. Whilst learning styles refer to fixed characteristics or preferences of learners, learning types refer to different kinds of learning activities and pedagogical approaches that can be designed into a course.

Copy of the ABC learning design Pedagogy Quick Read

These learning types are representative simplifications of pre-existing learning theories. For each learning type, educators can use different activities to deliver that type of learning. The activities will depend on your context and what’s right and applicable for your students.

How can I apply ABC learning design?

ABC learning design is often done in a team-based workshop setting (you can do it by yourself as well). Firstly, you analyse your existing content. Consider the goal of your current learning sequence, and assess how your learners are going to reach that goal with the different learning types.

Educators in the classroom

By analysing existing content and activities, you can then identify what’s missing from your sequence. This allows you to build on existing gaps and consider different types of activities you could implement. You then create a set of learning cards, which help you to storyboard and plan your new learning sequence.

Learning cards are typically postcard-sized and colour-coded to one of the six learning types. Colour coding helps you to tell the cards apart, and to easily see which learning types are or aren’t included in your sequence. 

Each card has the name and a short description of the learning type on the front, with examples of associated digital or in-person learning activities on the back. The learning cards:

  • Make the design process more engaging
  • Help with decision making
  • Support discussions if you’re working in a team
ABC Learning design cards and their application to an ABC storyboard plan

Adapting ABC learning design for your context

ABC design can be contextualised to your classroom, practices, and school, and to the technologies you have available. For example, on the back of each learning card you could include a set of activities that have been tried and tested in, or approved by, your school. Alternatively, you could link to other frameworks or teaching approaches that work for you and your students. 

Learning cards can also be used to collect other insights about teaching and learning within your context, and used as reminders of pedagogies to implement, as well as practical concerns. They can also help you to consider if there are opportunities for cross-curricular links within your learning sequence.

A shared toolkit you can reuse

In a computing department, ABC learning cards can become a shared resource that give fellow educators an understanding of what’s possible. The cards can be used again and again to help plan future learning experiences. 

Educators sharing ideas on a whiteboard

By running an ABC workshop and creating these learning cards, you and your team will put together a contextualised learning sequence toolkit specific to your school and learners.

Integration with universal design for learning to improve accessibility

In our blog How to build young people’s agency through accessible learning, we explored the universal design for learning (UDL) framework. UDL aims to support educators to reduce barriers for learners. It helps educators to create learning environments that are accessible and effective for all learners by providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression.

Gormley et al. (2022) described an initiative to integrate UDL within ABC learning design. They developed adapted ABC learning cards where the reverse side included specific UDL prompts, in addition to the usual example activities. For example:

  • An acquisition card could include the prompt “Will materials be available in a variety of formats (text, audio, and visual)? Will videos be captioned and transcribed?”
  • A production card could include the prompt “Are there multiple ways for learners to demonstrate their understanding? Can they choose between writing, presenting, or creating?”

By including these UDL considerations directly on the ABC cards, the design team ensured that accessibility and inclusivity were central to learning design conversations.

Adding UDL prompts to your learning cards is a fantastic way to help you design accessible learning sequences.

Applying ABC learning design: Some ideas for computing educators

In 2020, during the pandemic, the Computing at School (CAS) Research Working Group worked with classroom teachers to apply ABC learning design in their own contexts. 

Following some training, teachers analysed their existing classroom activities and then developed a range of suitable alternatives for remote learning, categorising them into low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech options. 
The different activity options were then added to their own sets of ABC learning cards and used to help adapt lessons for remote teaching. You can read more about the project and view example cards on the CAS website.

The benefits of using ABC learning design

Potential benefits for educators:

  • Enables more rapid creation and delivery of high-quality content
  • Allows you to audit your current learning sequence and identify gaps that can be improved upon
  • Provides a shared, contextualised toolkit for curriculum design

Potential benefits for students:

  • Tailored, engaging, high-quality learning experiences

Want to hear more about ABC learning design?

If you’d like to find out more about ABC learning design, you can download our Quick Read for free.

Download the ABC learning design Pedagogy Quick Read

You can also listen to a thought-provoking discussion on the topic between James Robinson, Carrie Anne Philbin, Jane Waite, and Matthew Wimpenny-Smith in season 1, episode 6 of the Hello World podcast: Could curriculum design be as simple as ABC?

The post How to rapidly design and adapt quality learning experiences for your students appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Essential tips to integrate computer science into your lessons: Teacher tips from CSTA 2025

Post Syndicated from Sean Sayers original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/teacher-tips-csta-2025-integrating-computer-science/

In our latest podcast miniseries, we spoke to educators live from the CS11TA 2025 annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, to hear their top tips for integrating computer science (CS) into other subjects.

Behind the scenes of Meg Wang, editor of the Hello World magazine presenting the latest episodes of the Hello World podcast, from CSTA 2025.

Hello World editor, Meg Wang and the team met teachers in the exhibit hall for real-time reflections and essential teacher tips on teaching cross-curricular CS. They spoke to some amazing educators from across the United States and had a great time interacting with everyone in attendance.

“Meeting teachers and hearing first-hand about their experiences, challenges, and triumphs was invaluable. It was amazing to meet Hello World writers in person, and to also meet future writers. Like I said at the conference, Hello World is for educators, by educators, so that means you! Everyone has valuable experience or useful advice to share, and we’re here to help you amplify that.” – Meg Wang, editor of the Hello World magazine

Who features in the episode, and what are their tips?

Lisa Wenzel, CS teacher from Maryland, USA

Lisa Wenzel, CS teacher in Maryland, USA, smiling and holding a physical copy of Hello World, issue 27.

Lisa’s top tip for integrating computer science into your lessons is to start with topics that you’re passionate about. If you’re not a CS teacher yourself, Lisa suggests finding a colleague who teaches the subject. She advises having a chat with them to explore how you can include CS concepts into subjects you’re particularly interested in.

“I guarantee you that they’re going to have something […] to teach [another subject], and it’s going to involve computer science.” 

Through peer discussions and collaboration between educators, you’ll discover engaging ways that you can incorporate CS into your teaching. Give it a try the next time you’re chatting to a CS teacher.

Tiffany N. Jones, CS and Cybersecurity teacher in Georgia, USA

Tiffany N. Jones CS & Cybersecurity teacher in Georgia, USA smiling showcasing her article in Hello World Issue 27.

Tiffany N. Jones, author of ‘Belonging in Tech’ (featured on page 82 of Hello World Issue 27), shares her top tip to seamlessly integrate computer science into other subjects. 

Using the example of a class studying ocean health and pollution, Tiffany shares how you can introduce students to real-world applications of computer science by exploring how sensors and microcontrollers can be used to collect environmental data. 

She then suggests exploring how databases and programming languages can be used to analyse and visualise the data that the sensors and microcontrollers have recorded. This not only deepens your learner’s scientific understanding but also demonstrates how computing concepts are used in real-world industry practices.

Rick Ballew, CS and Engineering teacher in Minnesota, USA

Rick Ballew CS & Engineering teacher in Minnesota, USA smiling holding a physical copy of Hello World issue 27

Rick’s top tip for integrating CS is to first think about your favourite lesson and consider ways that you can introduce computational thinking.

In the podcast, Rick says:

“chances are, computational thinking is already a part of that lesson you’re doing. Call it out to the students, and that’s going to help them to start understanding how computer science is baked into everything we do.” 

Rick also offers a great example from his experience as a band teacher. He shares how learning to read a new piece of music is very similar to the steps involved in computational thinking. s

“[You’ve] got to break it down. There’s abstraction. You’ve got to figure out the sequencing, and you create the way that you’re going to learn it. And that is all part of computational thinking.” 

This approach shows students that CS isn’t just coding; it’s a way of thinking that can be applied across disciplines.

Listen now

To hear more practical teacher tips and discover what else our guest teachers had to say, listen to or watch the full episode here. 

We hope this episode inspires you and helps you to engage your students in computing. We’d love to hear your thoughts, your feedback, and any of your own tips on how to integrate CS into other subjects. Share your advice in the comments section below.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

More to listen to next week

Next week, we’ll be sharing an interesting conversation between Ben Garside, Senior Learning Manager (AI Literacy) at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Leonida Soi, Learning Manager (Kenya) at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and two of our global Experience AI partners, Monika Katkutė-Gelžinė from Vedliai in Lithuania, and Aimy Lee from Penang Science Cluster in Malaysia.

Selfie with the Hello World Podcast team

They’ll be exploring what AI education looks like around the world and what teachers need to feel confident teaching it.

You can watch or listen to each episode of our podcast on YouTube, or listen via your preferred audio streaming service, whether that’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music. 

Subscribe to Hello World today to ensure you never miss a podcast episode or issue of the magazine.

Subscribe

The post Essential tips to integrate computer science into your lessons: Teacher tips from CSTA 2025 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

How to build young people’s agency through accessible learning

Post Syndicated from Sean Sayers original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/how-to-build-young-peoples-agency-through-accessible-learning/

We think computing or computer science (CS) needs to be accessible to all learners, and we know that teachers work hard towards this. Traditional CS approaches can lack flexibility, creating barriers to learning and excluding some young people. In today’s blog, we’re highlighting the ‘Universal design for learning’ (UDL) framework and how you can use it to make computing education more accessible to all your learners.

Children in the classroom learning Computer Science

We also share our new UDL-focused Pedagogy Quick Read, which you can download for free to:

  • Find practical tips for how to use the UDL framework and related approaches with your learners
  • Read a summary of the research behind the framework

Universal Design for Learning: Because one size does not fit all

Everyone is different and has their own way of learning. What works for one young person may not work for the next. So why should we expect learners to be taught the same material in the same way? 

Todd Rose, a contributor to the UDL framework, highlights the factors involved with a young person’s ability to engage and participate in learning. These include cognitive, social-emotional, family background and academic factors. He dispels the idea of an “average” learner, and instead suggests the concept of learner variability. 

Picture of our new UDL-focused Pedagogy Quick Read
The new Quick Read

As educators, it’s important to consider that students will likely be at different stages of understanding, and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t suitable. The UDL framework avoids this mindset and provides teachers with structured guidelines to design accessible lessons from the beginning. 

What is the UDL framework?

The UDL framework encourages educators to provide flexibility for learners in three areas: 

  • Multiple means of engagement: The “why of learning”, which helps to pique students’ curiosity and motivates them to stay engaged
  • Multiple means of representation: The “what of learning”, which focuses on presenting information in different ways to make the content accessible
  • Multiple means of action and expression: The “how of learning”, which relates to different ways for students to access learning and express their understanding

How can I apply the UDL framework?

Two things are key while you are planning how to apply the UDL framework with your learners:

  • Try not to introduce all three areas at once to your practice. Instead, focus on one area of the framework at a time and reflect to identify where there might be gaps. Focus on these first and make changes one by one.
  • Consider how different approaches will work for different groups and individuals. Try to identify what works for your learners and vary or adapt your approach as necessary.

Applying UDL: Some ideas for teaching programming

Multiple means of engagement — show learners different reasons for engaging in programming. For example:

  • Solving real-life problems
  • Interest in technology or logical thinking
  • Creative expression

Multiple means of representation — teach programming concepts in multiple ways. For example:

  • Demonstrate through live coding
  • Write on a blackboard with a flowchart
  • Let learners label and assemble bits of paper into a ‘program’

Multiple means of action and expression — teach with accessibility in mind. For example:

  • Use tools appropriate for learners’ mouse and keyboard skills
  • Let learners demonstrate their understanding in different ways (e.g. verbally, by writing/drawing, by creating a program)

The UDL framework aligns closely with several key research-supported pedagogies that you can use for effective instruction in computational thinking and programming. For example, the pedagogy approach ‘Use-Modify-Create’ (UMC) can be paired with the UDL categories. The new Quick Read explores these connections in more detail.

Students in the classroom

The benefits of the UDL framework

Potential benefits for teachers:

  • The framework provides a clear structure for designing learning activities that appeal to and engage the widest set of learners
  • It can help you consider all the ways you might engage your learners and make CS lessons more accessible.
  • UDL encourages you to reflect on the different ways in which you might represent concepts and ideas
  • It can help you to build learner agency and independence in your students by offering them different ways to express their learning in CS topics. 

Potential benefits for learners:

  • The framework promotes a sense of ownership over their learning. Which can boost their motivation and resilience to sticking with difficult challenges. 
  • They will likely find content that resonates with them, leading to higher engagement and therefore learning.
  • They will be able to demonstrate their CS knowledge confidently and engage limitlessly in CS contexts.

Our new Quick Read shares tips on how to best use the framework in your teaching. 

Download the Quick Read 

Inclusive computer science: The wider context

We know there is a lack of representation within the field of CS. Our recent position paper ‘Why kids still need to learn to code in the age of AI’ and an episode of the  Hello World podcast, ‘How can we empower girls in computing’ touched on this. Both highlight why it’s important that learners from all backgrounds are empowered to contribute their perspectives and experiences and shape the future with computing.

Photo from the Hello World podcast, ‘How can we empower girls in computing
Guests and host during the recording of our ‘How can we empower girls in computing’ episode

“The reality is that access to the opportunities to learn about computer science, programming, and coding has remained deeply unequal, both within and between countries. That has helped create a technology sector that doesn’t reflect the broad diversity of human backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. And we are all living with the consequences.” – Philip Colligan, Mark Griffiths, Veronica Cucuiat

“If we don’t have a diverse range of people designing and implementing that tech, then we are going to come across issues.” – Becky Patel, Tech She Can, Hello World podcast”

By embracing the principles of ‘Universal design for learning’ and similar approaches, we can create a more inclusive and equitable learning environment in computer science for everyone.

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Adapting our computing curriculum resources for Kenya — the journey so far

Post Syndicated from Fiona Coventry original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/adapting-our-computing-curriculum-resources-for-kenya-the-journey-so-far/

Young people everywhere deserve a high-quality computing education. But what a high-quality computing education looks like differs depending on a learner’s culture, context, and the existing provision in the country they live in. Therefore, adapting our educational resources for a range of contexts is a key part of our work at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, for example when we collaborate with partners to localise our Computing Curriculum resources.

Two young people using a computer.

In this blog post, we share our experiences of adapting curriculum resources with our partners in Kenya, and the impact of this work. This is the first post in a mini-series of three — look out for the upcoming ones about our partnerships in the Indian states of Odisha and Telangana.

Our computing curriculum partnerships in Kenya

Last year, we embarked on partnerships in two areas of Kenya and aimed to roll out computing curriculum resources to students in grades 4 to 9 in Kenyan schools:

During the 2024 academic year, we trained 39 local community trainers, who subsequently trained 453 teachers. We also adapted The Computing Curriculum materials to develop resources — lesson plans, presentation slides, and supporting activities — that are relevant and engaging in the schools our partners work with.

Educators participate in a teacher training in Kenya.

Impact in 2024

We estimate that around 55,000 students were reached by our Kenya computing curriculum resources in 2024. Most teachers who had used our resources felt the lessons had improved their students’ knowledge and skills. Of those who responded to our follow-up survey:

  • 94% agreed that their students had improved their knowledge of computing concepts
  • 92% agreed that their students have developed their computing skills
  • 90% agreed that their students better understand how to use technology safely.
Young people using tablets in a classroom.

This was supported by conversations with teachers and students. In student focus groups, students were able to list topics they had learned about and skills they had developed.

“….The lessons have had a significant positive impact on the students. They now demonstrate greater confidence in using technology, particularly with tasks involving programming in Scratch. This has improved their problem-solving skills and made them more engaged in learning.” – Teacher, Mombasa

“In my computing lessons, I’ve learned how to use a computer safely and properly. I learned how to type, use the mouse, and open programs. We also learned about coding, which is really fun because we can make things happen on the screen by giving the computer instructions. I’ve also learned how to create a simple document using software like Excel sheets. I really enjoy using the computer to solve problems and make things work.” – Learner,  FCDC

Implementation: Challenges, solutions, and building on progress

While teachers tended to agree that students’ skills and knowledge had increased, fewer felt that most students had achieved the specific learning objectives identified in the resources. This was often due to the content being only partially delivered, for example, due to limited availability of computing equipment in schools. However, many students lacked prior experience with the topics covered in the lessons, suggesting a large improvement in their skills compared to a low baseline.

Young people learning about computing in a classroom.

Similarly, some training sessions were affected by challenges with the equipment, infrastructure, and learning environment available. Teachers were appreciative of the training and many have begun to deliver the computing lessons, but often lacked prior experience with computing and hence requested additional support.

In response to feedback from partners and teachers, we made some updates to our Computing Curriculum and training resources in preparation for the 2025 academic year. For example, we increased the alignment to Kenya’s national curriculum, prepared a more comprehensive teacher guide, and incorporated time for teachers to discuss solutions to common delivery challenges during training.

Educators participate in a teacher training in Kenya.

In 2025, we are working with partners to upskill even more teachers and broaden the reach of our computing lessons to a further four counties. Our partners have now begun upskilling both new and existing teachers on the updated resources, and we will continue to work with them to monitor and evaluate their programme’s success in the coming months.

Want to learn more about our curriculum resources?

You can access our free Computing Curriculum resources on our website — we are currently working to make the materials for Kenya, and for India, downloadable there.

Look out for the next blog in this mini-series in July!

The post Adapting our computing curriculum resources for Kenya — the journey so far appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

How to give your students structure as they learn programming skills

Post Syndicated from Jan Ander original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/how-to-give-your-students-structure-as-they-learn-programming-skills/

Creating a computer program involves many different skills — knowing how to code is just one part. When we teach programming to young people, we want to guide them to learn these skills in a structured way. The ‘levels of abstraction’ framework is a great tool for doing that. This blog describes how using the framework will benefit you and your learners in the computing classroom.

Two learners at a laptop in a computing classroom.

We’re also excited to share our new Pedagogy Quick Read, which you can download for free to:

  • Find practical tips for using the ‘levels of abstraction’ framework with your learners
  • Read a summary of the research behind the framework

Learning to program: Everything at once?

Creating a program from the ground up can be daunting, especially for new learners. Without support, they’ll likely get stuck sooner or later; programs rarely work the first time round. And the more complex the problem that a program is addressing, the more likely it is that the first version of the program won’t work.

In a computing classroom, two girls concentrate on their programming task.

One reason that learning to program can be challenging is that it involves understanding a lot of specific concepts and applying many varied skills. From early on in their learning journey, young people need to have a firm grasp of concepts such as repetition, selection, variables, and functions. Also fundamental to learning to program well is the skill of abstraction: understanding a task and identifying which details are relevant and which can be ignored.

To get to grips with all these different concepts and skills, young people need structure — otherwise they’ll try to hold everything in their head at once, and likely feel overwhelmed by the cognitive load. This sort of experience may cause them to disengage instead of persisting. They may even decide that programming is not for them.

In light of these challenges, the ‘levels of abstraction’ framework is a great tool for teaching.

The benefits of the ‘levels of abstraction’ framework

The framework breaks programming down into four levels, each focusing on a different aspect of creating a program:

  • Problem: Analysing the problem or task the program should address, to understand and record the requirements.
  • Design: Turning the analysis into an algorithm — a set of steps for the computer to follow to create the desired output. This can involve flowcharts or storyboards, but importantly no code.
  • Code: Developing the code based on the design (and building the physical components if any are involved).
  • Running the code: Testing the code, checking outputs, and debugging where necessary.

Throughout the processes of developing a program, learners (and professional programmers) move between these levels as they implement their designs and debug them, sometimes even returning to the problem level if more analysis or clarification is needed.

Young child in the classroom using Scratch to program.

Potential benefits of the ‘levels of abstraction’ framework for teachers:

  • It helps you break down the activity of programming into discrete parts.
  • It helps you engage your learners, as you can show them that programming involves more than knowing how to code.
  • If your learners get stuck with their programming, the framework can help you guide them to a solution.

Potential benefits for learners:

  • The framework will help them think through all the steps needed to create a program that works, and practise their problem-solving skills and analytical thinking.
  • They will more readily see how programming connects to their world — at the problem level — and find aspects of programming where they have strengths and can use their creativity.
  • They will gain a stronger idea of how software is built in the tech sector.

Our new Quick Read shares tips on how to best use the framework in your teaching.

Download the Quick Read

Things to aim for when using the framework with your learners:

  • Be aware of what level they are working at and when it’s time to switch to a different one.
  • Understand that, when they encounter an issue with their program, they can step back and use the framework to figure out where the issue comes from. The issue might be a bug in the code, the algorithm not working as intended, or a description of the problem not taking into account something important.

We hope you find the framework useful. If you have ideas for how to use it in your teaching, why not share them in the comments?

Teaching programming: The wider context

When following the ‘levels of abstraction’ approach, learners need to explain how programs work and debug them. That means program comprehension is a key skill here. You may have already helped your learners to develop and practise this skill, for example with the PRIMM approach. The Block Model is another useful tool for helping your learners talk about various aspects of a program. And if you use the pair programming approach in programming activities, your learners can improve their program comprehension by talking about their code with each other. On our website, you’ll find more guidance on the best ways to teach programming and computing.

Photo of a young person coding on a desktop computer.

And what about generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools for programmers? In the age of AI, we think young people still need to learn to code because it empowers them to navigate and think critically about all digital technologies, including AI. And while generative AI tools can help a skilled programmer create quality code more quickly, more research is needed to show whether such tools help school-age young people build their understanding as they learn to code. You can see some of the great work being done in this area if you catch up with our 2024 research seminar series.

The ‘levels of abstraction’ framework is useful in your teaching no matter what tools young people use to create programs. Even with an AI tool, they will still need to work at all four levels of abstraction to program effectively. 

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Why kids still need to learn to code in the age of AI 

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-kids-still-need-to-learn-to-code-in-the-age-of-ai/

Today we’re publishing a position paper setting out five arguments for why we think that kids still need to learn to code in the age of artificial intelligence.

A whimsical cartoon of someone struggling with vibe coding at a desktop computer and a second person with a superhero cape and a t-shirt saying 'programmer' coming to their rescue.
Generated using ChatGPT.

Just like every wave of technological innovation that has come before, the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising profound questions about the future of human work. History teaches us that technology has the potential to both automate and augment human effort, destroying some jobs and creating new ones. The only thing we know for sure is that it is impossible to predict the precise nature and pace of the changes that are coming. 

One of the fastest-moving applications of generative AI technologies are the systems that can generate code. What started as the coding equivalent of autocomplete has quickly progressed to tools that can generate increasingly complex code from natural language prompts. 

This has given birth to the notion of “vibe-coding” and led some commentators to predict the end of the software development industry as we know it. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that there is a vigorous debate about whether kids still need to learn to code. 

In the position paper we put forward five arguments for why we think the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Download the paper

We need humans who are skilled programmers 

First, we argue that even in a world where AI can generate code, we need skilled human programmers who can think critically, solve problems, and make ethical decisions. The large language models that underpin these tools are probabilistic systems designed to provide statistically acceptable outputs and, as any skilled software engineer will tell you, simply writing more code faster isn’t necessarily a good thing. 

Learning to code is an essential part of learning to program

Learning to code is the most effective way we know for a young person to develop the mental models and fluency to become a skilled human programmer. The hard cognitive work of reading, modifying, writing, explaining, and testing code is precisely how young people develop a deep understanding of programming and computational thinking. 

Learning to code will open up even more opportunities in the age of AI 

While there’s no doubt that AI is going to reshape the labour market, the evidence from history suggests that it will increase the reach of programming and computational approaches across the economy and into new domains, creating demand for humans who are skilled programmers. We also argue that coding is no longer just for software engineers, it’s becoming a core skill that enables people to work effectively and think critically in a world shaped by intelligent machines. From healthcare to agriculture, we are already seeing demand for people who can combine programming with domain-specific skills and craft knowledge. 

Coding is a literacy that helps young people have agency in a digital world

Alongside the arguments for coding as a route to opening up economic opportunities, we argue that coding and programming gives young people a way to express themselves, to learn, and to make sense of the world. 

And perhaps most importantly, that learning to code is about power. Providing young people with a solid grounding in computational literacy, developed through coding, helps ensure that they have agency. Without it, they risk being manipulated by systems they don’t understand. As Rushkoff said: “Program, or be programmed”.  

The kids who learn to code will shape the future

Finally, we argue that the power to create with technology is already concentrated in too small and homogenous a group of people. We need to open up the opportunity to learn to code to all young people because it will help us mobilise the full potential of human talent, will lead to more inclusive and effective digital solutions to the big global challenges we face, and will help ensure that everyone can share in the societal and economic benefits of technological progress. 

The work we need to do 

We end the paper with a call to action for all of us working in education. We need to challenge the false narrative that AI is removing the need for kids to learn to code, and redouble our efforts to ensure that all young people are equipped to take advantage of the opportunities in a world where AI is ubiquitous.

You can read the full paper here:

“Why kids still need to learn to code in the age of AI”Download the paper

The cartoon image for this blog was created using ChatGPT-4o, which was prompted to produce a “whimsical cartoon that expresses some of the key ideas in the position paper”. It took several iterations.

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What do we even mean by digital literacy?

Post Syndicated from Rachel Arthur original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/what-do-we-even-mean-by-digital-literacy/

’Digital literacy’ is a term that seems to pop up everywhere. In the early 2000s, it was the next big thing; some even suggested it might replace traditional literacy and numeracy. But, like many educational trends, it soon faded from the spotlight, and became something that schools ‘should’ do, or something left to the lone teacher who had been handed the role of IT coordinator. 

For many teachers, at least in the UK, digital literacy meant booking a set of laptops (and hoping the last class had remembered to charge them) and ticking off history learning objectives by making a PowerPoint about Henry VIII’s wives. It became a bit of an afterthought. 

More recently, digital literacy seems to have been rebranded as ‘digital skills’, often framed as the capabilities young people need for the workplace of tomorrow. But I don’t think that tells the full story. 

Digital literacy beyond employability

Digital literacy isn’t just about employability; it’s about fairness and access. It’s about more than just learning to use spreadsheets (though my love for Excel remains strong); it’s about ensuring that all young people have the knowledge and confidence to navigate the digital world we live in today.

Digital literacy is about understanding the digital tools we rely on every day, securely accessing online services, making informed decisions about sharing personal information, and critically evaluating the endless stream of news and misinformation online. 

It’s also about artificial intelligence: not just playing with the latest tools, but understanding how they work, the biases built into them, and the ways they shape our lives.

Three ways to help students learn about the impact of technology

True digital literacy empowers young people to engage with technology thoughtfully, critically, and confidently. And that’s something worth making space for. To truly ensure that young people have fair access to the digitally enabled world we live in, we must equip them with the skills to understand and use technology effectively. This means making space for digital literacy within the curriculum and ensuring that all teachers feel confident in delivering it.

Digital literacy as a core part of teaching

Every teacher has a role to play in helping students develop these essential skills. This requires high-quality curriculum resources that integrate digital tools meaningfully into different subjects, as well as comprehensive teacher training to ensure every educator feels empowered to teach digital literacy as part of their everyday practice. 

So, let’s not treat digital literacy like that forgotten box of tangled charging cables in the staffroom (important, but nobody is quite sure what to do with it). Instead, let’s make it a core part of teaching, just like reading, writing, and knowing how to keep a straight face when a student asks if they really need to save their work.

Two girls code at a desktop computer while a female mentor observes them.

If we get this right, we’re not just preparing young people for the jobs of tomorrow, we’re making sure they can navigate today’s digital world safely, confidently, and with the critical thinking skills to tell fact from fiction (because let’s face it, the internet isn’t exactly short on absolute nonsense). 

Now, who’s up for making a PowerPoint about Henry VIII’s wives? 

More on digital literacy

You can discover our free teacher training and classroom resources, and read about how we’ve integrated digital literacy in The Computing Curriculum.

A version of this article appears in the newest issue of Hello World magazine, which is all about digital literacy. Explore issue 26 and download your free PDF copy today.

You can also listen to our recent Hello World podcast episode exploring three teachers’ digital literacy tips for the classroom.

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Pedagogy Quick Reads: turning abstract ideas into classroom practice

Post Syndicated from James Robinson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pedagogy-quick-reads-turning-abstract-ideas-into-classroom-practice/

What does outstanding computing education look like in the age of AI? We’ve just released a new series of Pedagogy Quick Reads exploring this vital question. Focusing on three aspects of AI in computing education, these short guides offer practical insights and new strategies for your classroom practice.

In a computing classroom, a smiling girl raises her hand.

Each Pedagogy Quick Read is designed to help educators explore, understand, and apply one area of research evidence.

You get:

  • An introduction to the topic or idea, putting it into context
  • A summary of the key concepts and takeaways for educators
  • Sections elaborating on each key concept and relevant research
  • A diagram presenting the same ideas in visual form
  • Links to referenced resources for further reading

Introducing our AI Pedagogy Quick Reads

Computational Thinking 2.0

This Quick Read explores how the concept of computational thinking is evolving, particularly in the context of AI. It offers guidance on how to teach computational thinking skills that are relevant to and enhanced by AI technologies.

“Without CT2.0, today’s learners will remain passive consumers rather than informed participants in a world increasingly shaped by data-driven AI technologies.”

Download

Anthropomorphism

As AI becomes widely used, it’s important to consider how students understand and view these technologies. This Quick Read discusses anthropomorphism (attributing human-like qualities to AI) and provides strategies for teaching about AI in a way that avoids common misconceptions.

“If young people see this technology as innately human-like, we run the risk of impacting their…sense of agency…safety…social connection…curiosity.”

Download

Feedback Literacy

Effective feedback is important for student learning, especially in a rapidly changing field like AI. This Quick Read examines how to develop “feedback literacy” in both educators and students, enabling them to give, receive, and use feedback more effectively.

“How do we ensure that all students get the most out of AI system-produced feedback? Feedback literacy is a theory-driven framework that can help…answer this question.”

Download

Browse our library of pedagogy resources

The new AI-themed reads join our bank of other Pedagogy Quick Reads, which cover a wide range of topics related to computing education. You can find these resources and more on our pedagogy page, all organised around our 12 pedagogy principles for computing education.

a teenage boy does coding during a computer science lesson.

Other resources 

As well as our Pedagogy Quick Reads, we also offer lots of other resources to support computing educators:

  • The Hello World Big Book of Computing Pedagogy is an in-depth guide to research-backed computing education pedagogy, covering a wide range of topics and offering practical advice for teachers.
  • The Hello World magazine and podcast feature insights from educators in computing education, exploring current research, best classroom practices, and innovative teaching strategies.
  • Our AI literacy programme, Experience AI, provides teachers with cutting-edge resources on AI and machine learning, based on proven pedagogical principles to support effective learning and teaching.

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Raspberry Pi Foundation joins UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition

Post Syndicated from Ben Garside original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-foundation-joins-unescos-global-education-coalition/

Introduction

We are thrilled to announce that the Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) has been accepted as a member of UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition (GEC). 

Global Education Coalition.

Initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when 1.6 billion learners were shut out of the classroom, the GEC aimed to provide continuity of education in times of crisis. Since then, the Coalition has grown into a global multistakeholder network, and we are proud to help drive education transformation and accelerate the path to achieving UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4 – Quality Education).

UNESCO’s vision to transform education for the world’s most underserved aligns with our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Being part of the Coalition enables us to work together to achieve this shared aim. 

In addition to being part of the GEC, we have been invited to join the Digital Transformation Collaborative (DTC), a tech-focused subgroup that empowers educators and education leaders to include emerging technologies in their teaching practices and decision-making through capacity building and training.

Coalition achievements

We’re joining a coalition that has already achieved a lot. Having attended the GEC annual conference last week in Paris, Ms Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, stated that to date the GTC has:

  • Helped over 858,898 youth develop skills that make them more employable
  • Trained 794,580 teachers
  • Offered learning resources to more than 1,000,000 learners studying foundational subjects, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
  • Reached 2,459,192 of the most marginalised girls and women

Source: https://www.unesco.org/en/global-education-coalition

Whilst these are amazing achievements to celebrate, there is still more work to do, with Ms Giannini also highlighting that there are currently 251 million children and youth out of school and that 44 million more teachers are needed for universal primary and secondary education by 2030. 

A group of educators at a conference.

Digital Transformation Collaborative

Our commitment to the Coalition

The Digital Transformation Collaborative (DTC), which the Foundation has committed to support, aims to play a crucial role in shaping the future of education through technology. The group has established a framework structured around six core pillars:

  1. Coordination and leadership
  2. Connectivity and infrastructure
  3. Cost and sustainability
  4. Capacity and culture
  5. Content and solutions
  6. Data and evidence

Through our work at the Foundation, we believe we have the expertise to provide meaningful support through the sharing of our expertise across these issues. Many of these are challenges we work to overcome through the delivery of our programmes. 

Six pillars for the digital transformation of education.

Conclusion

Joining UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition marks a significant milestone for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Our mission to empower the underserved aligns with the Coalition’s goals. We are excited to contribute our expertise and resources to this global effort, driving forward the agenda for inclusive and equitable quality education for all.

I’m looking forward to writing more on our projects and initiatives within the GEC as we move forward and work together to transform global education.

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Empowering India’s digital future: Our computing curriculum’s impact

Post Syndicated from Ben Durbin original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/empowering-indias-digital-future-our-computing-curriculums-impact/

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been working in India since 2018 to enable young people to realise their potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. 

We’ve supported Code Clubs, partnered with government organisations, and designed and delivered a complete computing curriculum for students in grades 6 to 12 and at the undergraduate level. Our curriculum is tailored to the Indian context, and we provide extensive support to help teachers deliver it effectively.

Three female students at the Coding Academy in Telangana.

In another recent blog, we shared in detail how we’ve created an impactful curriculum for India. We’re now excited to share our new report evaluating how our curriculum is being taught in Telangana and Odisha. This report demonstrates the impact we’ve had so far, highlighting our successes and the key lessons we have learnt.

Key findings from the evaluation

Our evaluations of how the curriculum is being taught show that teachers are well-equipped to deliver the curriculum and provide high-quality and accessible learning experiences that develop students’ computing knowledge and skills.

A group of students in a classroom.

In Telangana, we partnered with the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TGSWREIS) to introduce our curriculum at the Coding Academy School and Coding Academy College. Our report found that all school and college teachers we trained agreed they felt confident teaching students using the resources provided. Students were very positive about the classes, and their assessment scores demonstrated strong learning outcomes: 77% of school students and 70% of college students achieved at least 60% of available marks.

In Odisha, we worked with Learning Links Foundation and Quest Alliance, in partnership with Panchasakha Sikhya Setu (PSS) Abhiyan, to deliver the IT and Coding Curriculum (Kaushali) to students in grades 9 and 10. Our findings were also very positive:

  • 87% of teacher respondents agreed that the curriculum resources were high quality and useful for their teaching
  • 91% felt more confident about teaching IT and coding due to the curriculum resources
  • 93% of teachers agreed that the training helped them understand the curriculum’s structure, content, and objectives
  • 89% felt confident in teaching the curriculum after the training
  • Teachers also reported a positive impact on their students, with almost all agreeing that it improved students’ coding skills, digital literacy, and understanding of responsible digital citizenship

The report also highlights how students better understood how computing and coding are used in the world and developed an increased interest in pursuing careers in these fields.

Key factors for effective implementation

Our evaluations show the importance of several factors when launching a computing curriculum:

  • Aligning content with students’ experience and interests: Content should be tailored to students’ existing knowledge, culturally relevant, and follow industry standards to prepare them for employment
  • Providing extensive support to teachers: This includes careful selection and training of master teachers, comprehensive training for teachers that considers their knowledge and experience, and ongoing support through webinars, calls, and classroom observations
  • Ensuring sufficient quantity and quality of infrastructure: Adequate equipment and internet access are crucial for effective teaching and learning

We are committed to always improving our approach to ensure that all young people in India have the opportunity to learn about computing.

Join us in shaping the future

You can read our new report here. If you are interested in partnering with us or want to learn more about our mission, please contact [email protected].

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UNESCO’s International Day of Education 2025: AI and the future of education

Post Syndicated from Ben Garside original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/unescos-international-day-of-education-2025/

Recently, our Chief Learning Officer Rachel Arthur and I had the opportunity to attend UNESCO’s International Day of Education 2025, which focused on the role of education in helping people “understand and steer AI to better ensure that they retain control over this new class of technology and are able to direct it towards desired objectives that respect human rights and advance progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals”.

How teachers continue to play a vital role in the future of education

Throughout the event, a clear message from UNESCO was that teachers have a very important role to play in the future of education systems, regardless of the advances in technology — a message I find very reassuring. However, as with any good-quality debate, the sessions also reflected a range of other opinions and approaches, which should be listened to and discussed too. 

With this in mind, I was interested to hear a talk by a school leader from England who is piloting the first “teacherless” classroom. They are trialling a programme with twenty Year 10 students (ages 14–15), using an AI tool developed in-house. This tool is trained on eight existing learning platforms, pulling content and tailoring the learning experience based on regular assessments. The students work independently using an AI tool in the morning, supported by a learning mentor in the classroom, while afternoons focus on developing “softer skills”. The school believes this approach will allow students to complete their GCSE exams in just one year instead of two, seeing it as a solution to the years of lost learning caused by lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.

Whilst they were reporting early success in this approach, what occurred to me during the talk was the question of how we can decide if this approach is the right one. The results might sound attractive to school leaders, but do we need a more rounded view of what education should look like? Whatever your views on the purpose of schools, I suspect most people would agree that they serve a much greater purpose than just achieving the top results. 

Whilst AI tools may be able to provide personalised learning experiences, it is crucial to consider the role of teachers in young people’s education. If we listed the skills required for a teacher to do their job effectively, I believe we would all reach the same conclusion: teachers play a pivotal role in a young person’s life — one that definitely goes beyond getting the best exam results. According to the Educational Endowment Foundation, high-quality teaching is the most important lever schools have on pupil outcomes. 

“Quality education demands quality educators” – Farida Shaheed, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education

Also, at this stage in AI adoption, can we be sure that this use of AI tools isn’t disadvantageous to any students? We know that machine learning models generate biased results, but I’m not aware of research showing that these systems are fair to all students and do not disadvantage any demographic. An argument levelled against this point is that teachers can also be biased. Aside from the fact that systems have a potentially much larger impact on more students than any individual teacher, I worry that this argument leads to us accepting machine bias, rather than expecting the highest of standards. It is essential that providers of any educational software that processes student data adhere to the principles of fairness, accountability, transparency, privacy, and security (FATPS).

How can the agency of teachers be cultivated in AI adoption?

We are undeniably at a very early stage of a changing education landscape because of AI, and an important question is how teachers can be supported. 

“Education has a foundational role to play in helping individuals and groups determine what tasks should be outsourced to AI and what tasks need to remain firmly in human hands.” – UNESCO 

I was delighted to have been invited to be part of a panel at the event discussing how the agency of teachers can be cultivated in AI adoption. The panel consisted of people with different views and expertise, but importantly, included a classroom teacher, emphasising the importance of listening to educators and not making decisions on their behalf without them. As someone who works primarily on AI literacy education, my talk was centred around my belief that AI literacy education for teachers is of paramount importance. 

Having a basic understanding of how data-driven systems work will empower teachers to think critically and become discerning users, making conscious choices about which tools to use and for what purpose. 

For example, while attending the Bett education technology exhibition recently, I was struck by the prevalence of education products that included the use of AI. With ever more options available, we need teachers to be able to make informed choices about which products will benefit and not harm their students. 

“Teachers urgently need to be empowered to better understand the technical, ethical and pedagogical dimensions of AI.” – Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO, AI competency framework for teachers

A very interesting paper released recently showed that individuals with lower AI literacy levels are more receptive towards AI-powered products and services. In short, people with higher literacy levels are more aware of the capabilities and limitations of AI systems. Perhaps this doesn’t mean that people with higher AI literacy levels see all AI tools as ‘bad’, but maybe that they are more able to think critically about the tools and make informed choices about their use. 

UN Special Rapporteur highlights urgent education challenges

For me, the most powerful talk of the day came from Farida Shaheed, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education. I would urge anyone to listen to it (a recording is available on YouTube — the talk begins around 2:16:00). 

The talk included many facts that helped to frame some of the challenges we are facing. Ms Shaheed stated that “29% of all schools lack access to basic drinking water, without which education is not possible”. This is a sobering thought, particularly when there is a growing narrative that AI systems have the potential to democratise education. 

When speaking about the AI tools being developed for education, Ms Shaheed questioned who the tools are for: “It’s telling that [so very few edtech tools] are developed for teachers. […] Is this just because teachers are a far smaller client base or is it a desire to automate teachers out of the equation?”

I’m not sure if I know the answer to this question, but it speaks to my worry that the motivation for tech development does not prioritise taking a human-centred approach. We have to remember that as consumers, we do have more power than we think. If we do not want a future where AI tools are replacing teachers, then we need to make sure that there is not a demand for those tools. 

The conference was a fantastic event to be part of, as it was an opportunity to listen to such a diverse range of perspectives. Certainly, we are facing challenges, but equally, it is both reassuring and exciting to know that so many people across the globe are working together to achieve the best possible outcomes for future generations. Ms Shaheed’s concluding message resonated strongly with me:

“[Share good practices], so we can all move together in a co-creative process that is inclusive of everybody and does not leave anyone behind.” 

As always, we’d love to hear your views — you can contact us here.

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How Open Universities Australia modernized their data platform and significantly reduced their ETL costs with AWS Cloud Development Kit and AWS Step Functions

Post Syndicated from Michael Davies original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-open-universities-australia-modernized-their-data-platform-and-significantly-reduced-their-etl-costs-with-aws-cloud-development-kit-and-aws-step-functions/

This is a guest post co-authored by Michael Davies from Open Universities Australia.

At Open Universities Australia (OUA), we empower students to explore a vast array of degrees from renowned Australian universities, all delivered through online learning. We offer students alternative pathways to achieve their educational aspirations, providing them with the flexibility and accessibility to reach their academic goals. Since our founding in 1993, we have supported over 500,000 students to achieve their goals by providing pathways to over 2,600 subjects at 25 universities across Australia.

As a not-for-profit organization, cost is a crucial consideration for OUA. While reviewing our contract for the third-party tool we had been using for our extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, we realized that we could replicate much of the same functionality using Amazon Web Services (AWS) services such as AWS Glue, Amazon AppFlow, and AWS Step Functions. We also recognized that we could consolidate our source code (much of which was stored in the ETL tool itself) into a code repository that could be deployed using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). By doing so, we had an opportunity to not only reduce costs but also to enhance the visibility and maintainability of our data pipelines.

In this post, we show you how we used AWS services to replace our existing third-party ETL tool, improving the team’s productivity and producing a significant reduction in our ETL operational costs.

Our approach

The migration initiative consisted of two main parts: building the new architecture and migrating data pipelines from the existing tool to the new architecture. Often, we would work on both in parallel, testing one component of the architecture while developing another at the same time.

From early in our migration journey, we began to define a few guiding principles that we would apply throughout the development process. These were:

  • Simple and modular – Use simple, reusable design patterns with as few moving parts as possible. Structure the code base to prioritize ease of use for developers.
  • Cost-effective – Use resources in an efficient, cost-effective way. Aim to minimize situations where resources are running idly while waiting for other processes to be completed.
  • Business continuity – As much as possible, make use of existing code rather than reinventing the wheel. Roll out updates in stages to minimize potential disruption to existing business processes.

Architecture overview

The following Diagram 1 is the high-level architecture for the solution.

Diagram 1: Overall architecture of the solution, using AWS Step Functions, Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3

The following AWS services were used to shape our new ETL architecture:

  • Amazon Redshift – A fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon Redshift served as our central data repository, where we would store data, apply transformations, and make data available for use in analytics and business intelligence (BI). Note: The provisioned cluster itself was deployed separately from the ETL architecture and remained unchanged throughout the migration process.
  • AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) – The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning it through AWS CloudFormation. Our infrastructure was defined as code using the AWS CDK. As a result, we simplified the way we defined the resources we wanted to deploy while using our preferred coding language for development.
  • AWS Step Functions – With AWS Step Functions, you can create workflows, also called State machines, to build distributed applications, automate processes, orchestrate microservices, and create data and machine learning pipelines. AWS Step Functions can call over 200 AWS services including AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Redshift. We used the AWS Step Function state machines to define, orchestrate, and execute our data pipelines.
  • Amazon EventBridge – We used Amazon EventBridge, the serverless event bus service, to define the event-based rules and schedules that would trigger our AWS Step Functions state machines.
  • AWS Glue – A data integration service, AWS Glue consolidates major data integration capabilities into a single service. These include data discovery, modern ETL, cleansing, transforming, and centralized cataloging. It’s also serverless, which means there’s no infrastructure to manage. includes the ability to run Python scripts. We used it for executing long-running scripts, such as for ingesting data from an external API.
  • AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda is a highly scalable, serverless compute service. We used it for executing simple scripts, such as for parsing a single text file.
  • Amazon AppFlow – Amazon AppFlow enables simple integration with software as a service (SaaS) applications. We used it to define flows that would periodically load data from selected operational systems into our data warehouse.
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – An object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Amazon S3 served as our staging area, where we would store raw data prior to loading it into other services such as Amazon Redshift. We also used it as a repository for storing code that could be retrieved and used by other services.

Where practical, we made use of the file structure of our code base for defining resources. We set up our AWS CDK to refer to the contents of a specific directory and define a resource (for example, an AWS Step Functions state machine or an AWS Glue job) for each file it found in that directory. We also made use of configuration files so we could customize the attributes of specific resources as required.

Details on specific patterns

In the above architecture Diagram 1, we showed multiple flows by which data could be ingested or unloaded from our Amazon Redshift data warehouse. In this section, we highlight four specific patterns in more detail which were utilized in the final solution.

Pattern 1: Data transformation, load, and unload

Several of our data pipelines included significant data transformation steps, which were primarily performed through SQL statements executed by Amazon Redshift. Others required ingestion or unloading of data from the data warehouse, which could be performed efficiently using COPY or UNLOAD statements executed by Amazon Redshift.

In keeping with our aim of using resources efficiently, we sought to avoid running these statements from within the context of an AWS Glue job or AWS Lambda function because these processes would remain idle while waiting for the SQL statement to be completed. Instead, we opted for an approach where SQL execution tasks would be orchestrated by an AWS Step Functions state machine, which would send the statements to Amazon Redshift and periodically check their progress before marking them as either successful or failed. The following Diagram 2 shows this workflow.

Data transformation, load, and unload

Diagram 2: Data transformation, load, and unload pattern using Amazon Lambda and Amazon Redshift within an AWS Step Function

Pattern 2: Data replication using AWS Glue

In cases where we needed to replicate data from a third-party source, we used AWS Glue to run a script that would query the relevant API, parse the response, and store the relevant data in Amazon S3. From here, we used Amazon Redshift to ingest the data using a COPY statement. The following Diagram 3 shows this workflow.

Image 3: Copying from external API to Redshift with AWS Glue

Diagram 3: Copying from external API to Redshift with AWS Glue

Note: Another option for this step would be to use Amazon Redshift auto-copy, but this wasn’t available at time of development.

Pattern 3: Data replication using Amazon AppFlow

For certain applications, we were able to use Amazon AppFlow flows in place of AWS Glue jobs. As a result, we could abstract some of the complexity of querying external APIs directly. We configured our Amazon AppFlow flows to store the output data in Amazon S3, then used an EventBridge rule based on an End Flow Run Report event (which is an event which is published when a flow run is complete) to trigger a load into Amazon Redshift using a COPY statement. The following Diagram 4 shows this workflow.

By using Amazon S3 as an intermediate data store, we gave ourselves greater control over how the data was processed when it was loaded into Amazon Redshift, when compared with loading the data directly to the data warehouse using Amazon AppFlow.

Image 4: Using Amazon AppFlow to integrate external data

Diagram 4: Using Amazon AppFlow to integrate external data to Amazon S3 and copy to Amazon Redshift

Pattern 4: Reverse ETL

Although most of our workflows involve data being brought into the data warehouse from external sources, in some cases we needed the data to be exported to external systems instead. This way, we could run SQL queries with complex logic drawing on multiple data sources and use this logic to support operational requirements, such as identifying which groups of students should receive specific communications.

In this flow, shown in the following Diagram 5, we start by running an UNLOAD statement in Amazon Redshift to unload the relevant data to files in Amazon S3. From here, each file is processed by an AWS Lambda function, which performs any necessary transformations and sends the data to the external application through one or more API calls.

Image 5: Reverse ETL workflow, sending data back out to external data sources

Diagram 5: Reverse ETL workflow, sending data back out to external data sources

Outcomes

The re-architecture and migration process took 5 months to complete, from the initial concept to the successful decommissioning of the previous third-party tool. Most of the architectural effort was completed by a single full-time employee, with others on the team primarily assisting with the migration of pipelines to the new architecture.

We achieved significant cost reductions, with final expenses on AWS native services representing only a small percentage of projected costs compared to continuing with the third-party ETL tool. Moving to a code-based approach also gave us greater visibility of our pipelines and made the process of maintaining them quicker and easier. Overall, the transition was seamless for our end users, who were able to view the same data and dashboards both during and after the migration, with minimal disruption along the way.

Conclusion

By using the scalability and cost-effectiveness of AWS services, we were able to optimize our data pipelines, reduce our operational costs, and improve our agility.

Pete Allen, an analytics engineer from Open Universities Australia, says, “Modernizing our data architecture with AWS has been transformative. Transitioning from an external platform to an in-house, code-based analytics stack has vastly improved our scalability, flexibility, and performance. With AWS, we can now process and analyze data with much faster turnaround, lower costs, and higher availability, enabling rapid development and deployment of data solutions, leading to deeper insights and better business decisions.”

Additional resources

About the Authors

Michael Davies is a Data Engineer at OUA. He has extensive experience within the education industry, with a particular focus on building robust and efficient data architecture and pipelines.

Emma Arrigo is a Solutions Architect at AWS, focusing on education customers across Australia. She specializes in leveraging cloud technology and machine learning to address complex business challenges in the education sector. Emma’s passion for data extends beyond her professional life, as evidenced by her dog named Data.

Computing Curriculum Framework: Adapting to India’s diverse landscapes

Post Syndicated from Mamta Manaktala original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/computing-curriculum-framework-adapting-to-indias-diverse-landscapes/

The digital revolution has reshaped every facet of our lives, underscoring the need for robust computing education. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation our mission is to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. Since starting out in 2008 as a UK-based educational charity, we’ve grown into a global leader in advancing computing literacy.

An educator and students working on a coding task.

At the heart of our efforts lies a simple yet powerful vision: to ensure every young person develops the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use digital technologies effectively. This includes understanding societal and ethical issues, using technology for creative problem solving, and fostering a mindset of adaptability that will enable them to thrive amid rapid technological change.

A vision for global computing education

To realise this vision, we developed The Computing Curriculum (TCC). Launched in 2018 as part of the UK’s National Centre for Computing Education, TCC is a comprehensive set of free teaching resources tailored for students aged 5–16. Over the years, the curriculum has evolved through rigorous testing and teacher feedback, which has helped to make it one of the most effective and inclusive computing education tools globally.

A group of students in a classroom.

Contextualising computing education for India

India’s vast diversity — in languages, social and economic contexts, and educational infrastructure — creates unique challenges and opportunities. As a result, we at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have adapted and localised our computing curriculum to meet the needs of Indian students. Collaborations with the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TGSWREIS) and the Odisha Mo School programme have been pivotal in this endeavour.

Modelling data using a spreadsheet (Grade 9)
Creating media — audio production (Grade 7)

In Telangana, we adapted TCC to create a 70+ hour computing curriculum designed for government schools with limited resources. Similarly, in Odisha, elements of this curriculum have been tailored to develop Kaushali, an IT and coding curriculum for over 8,000 state schools. This localised approach ensures that computing education becomes accessible and relevant for students across India.

A curriculum designed for impact

The computing curriculum for India spans Grades 6 to 10 (age group 11-16) and is structured to ensure progressive learning. Students revisit foundational concepts repeatedly, building on prior knowledge as they advance through the grades. The curriculum emphasises forming a strong understanding of concepts over rote learning and integrates research-informed pedagogical approaches.

Students using computers in a classroom.

We tested our localised curriculum resources in Telangana Coding Academy, and there was lots of positive feedback from educators and observers. Overall, the educators were happy with the content format, and the observers noted that students enjoyed learning and completing the activities. This was also evident from the student discussion notes and student survey responses.

“[…] this content is more than what we are expecting for the school years[…] this time they [are] having [a] practical session. So they are very happy to do it and whenever they are free[,] they will come and ask us. ‘[C]an you take [an] extra class for us?’” – Educator

“[…] They are very [appreciative of] the content and [t]hey [are] learning very well, and the response is very good.” – Educator

Key features of the curriculum:

  • Tailored content: Materials are customised to align with the proficiency levels and contexts of Indian students, ensuring accessibility
  • Localised examples: By incorporating culturally relevant examples, students find the learning experience relatable and engaging
  • Simplified language: Designed for students who may lack confidence in English, the curriculum employs clear and concise language for better comprehension
  • Hands-on learning: Practical activities, including projects and model creation, solidify understanding and foster creativity
  • Ready-to-use resources: Teachers are equipped with lesson plans, presentations, worksheets, and activity sheets, reducing preparation time and enhancing delivery

Learning objectives:
The curriculum focuses on equipping students with:

  • An understanding of digital systems and their impact on people and society
  • Computational thinking and problem-solving skills for real-world applications
  • Confidence and knowledge to become creators and innovators
  • Awareness of digital citizenship and responsible technology use

Curriculum structure:
Each academic year includes 30–34 sessions, each lasting 45–60 minutes. Lessons are structured into deliverable units comprising detailed plans, presentations, and worksheets. Both plugged (computer-based) and unplugged (activity-based) learning methods are used, with a 60:40 ratio, ensuring balanced and inclusive learning experiences.

Sample progression across grades:

Curriculum highlights

Grade 6: Building a foundation

Students develop foundational computer skills, learn basic text formatting, and explore introductory programming concepts using Scratch. They also begin to understand how to group and describe objects based on their properties.  

Grade 7: Expanding horizons

Students delve into computer networks, the internet, and the World Wide Web. They learn to use loops in Scratch programming and explore data organisation using flat-file databases and spreadsheets.  

Grade 8: Deepening understanding

Students gain a deeper understanding of how computer systems function and use spreadsheets for data analysis. They continue to build their programming skills in Scratch, focusing on sequences, variables, and selection. They are also introduced to HTML and CSS for basic web development.  

Grade 9: Exploring advanced concepts

Students learn about data representation, including binary and character coding schemes. They design and create websites using HTML and CSS, incorporating accessibility and good web design principles. They also explore the layers of computing systems, including hardware, operating systems, and logic circuits.  

Grade 10: Applying knowledge and skills

Students explore advanced data representation, including image and sound representation. They are introduced to cybersecurity concepts and delve deeper into Python programming, focusing on selection and iteration. They also learn about data science and how to create a blog to support a cause.

Assessment framework:
To measure student progress effectively, the curriculum incorporates both formative and summative assessments:

  • Formative assessments: Embedded in lessons to monitor progress and identify misconceptions early.
  • Summative assessments: Provide a holistic overview of learning outcomes through tools like multiple-choice quizzes and rubrics. These assessments focus on understanding concepts and skills, moving beyond mere code writing.

Bridging the digital divide

Our localised computing curriculum is more than a technical education initiative — it is helping to bridge the digital divide. By empowering students with essential digital skills, it fosters innovation, enhances employability, and enables young people to participate actively in the global digital economy.

The road ahead

As technology continues to evolve, so does the need for adaptive and inclusive computing education. We remain committed to supporting governments, educators, and students in this journey. By fostering a generation of digitally literate and empowered individuals, we can create a future where technology serves as a force for good in society.

Through collaborations and localised efforts, the dream of making computing education accessible to every corner of India is steadily becoming a reality. Together, we can equip students with the skills and mindset needed to navigate the complexities of the digital age and shape a brighter, more inclusive future.

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Addressing the digital skills gap

Post Syndicated from Rachel Arthur original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/addressing-the-digital-skills-gap/

The digital skills gap is one of the biggest challenges for today’s workforce. It’s a growing concern for educators, employers, and anyone passionate about helping young people succeed.

Digital literacy is essential in today’s world, whether or not you’re aiming for a tech career — yet too many young people are entering adulthood without the skills to navigate it confidently and recent research shows that many young people finish school without formal digital qualifications.

Whilst this challenge is a global one, we’re exploring solutions in England where computing has been part of the national curriculum for a decade and the option of studying for a qualification (GCSE) in computer science is available to many 14-year-olds.

The SCARI report shows that GCSE computer science isn’t available in every school in England, and even where it is available, only a fraction of students opt to study it. Where GCSE computer science is offered, the focus is not on broader digital skills, but more on programming and theoretical knowledge which, while important, doesn’t support young people with the knowledge they need to succeed in the modern workplace.

How the Manchester Baccalaureate will help tackle the digital divide

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we’re working with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to tackle this challenge head-on. Together, as part of their Manchester Baccalaureate initiative, we’re developing a self-paced course and certification to tackle the digital skills gap directly. 

Teachers listening to a presentation at a recent workshop the Raspberry Pi Foundation held in Manchester.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation Certificate in Applied Computing is designed to be accessed by any pupil, anywhere. It includes a series of flexible modules that students can work through at their own pace. Targeted at young people ages 14 and up, the certificate covers three stages:

  • Stage 1 – Students gain essential digital skills, preparing them for a wide range of careers
  • Stages 2 and 3 – Students dive into specialisations in key tech areas, building expertise aligned with in-demand roles

What we’ve learnt in Manchester so far

We recently visited Oasis Academy Media City to hold a workshop on digital skills and get input on the certificate. We welcomed educators and industry experts to share their insights, and their feedback has been invaluable.

Teachers pointed out a common challenge: while they see the importance of digital skills, they often lack the time and resources to add new material to an already packed curriculum. By offering the certification as bite-sized modules that focus on specific skills, it makes it easier to slot the content into the timetable, and helps students with limited access to school (due to illness, for example) engage with the course.

Teachers listening to a presentation at a recent workshop the Raspberry Pi Foundation held in Manchester.

Educators were particularly excited about the opportunity for students to specialise in areas tied to in-demand roles that are currently being recruited for and our goal is to make the qualification engaging and relevant, helping students see how their learning applies in the real world.  

Next steps

We’re thrilled to share that, in November, we’ll be piloting this qualification in schools throughout Manchester. We’ll gather invaluable feedback from young people as they embark on this learning experience, which will help us refine the course. 

Our full qualification will launch in 2025, and we can’t wait to help students approach their futures with curiosity and confidence.

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AWS Education Equity Initiative: Applying generative AI to educate the next wave of innovators

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-education-equity-initiative-applying-generative-ai-to-educate-the-next-wave-of-innovators/

Building on the work that we and our partners have been doing for many years, Amazon is committing up to $100 million in cloud technology and technical resources to help existing, dedicated learning organizations reach more learners by creating new and innovative digital learning solutions, all as part of the AWS Education Equity Initiative.

The Work So Far
AWS and Amazon have a long-standing commitment to learning and education. Here’s a sampling of what we have already done:

AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program – This program has awarded $28 million in scholarships to approximately 6000 students.

Machine Learning University – MLU offers a free program helping community colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) teach data management, artificial intelligence, and machine learning concepts. The program is designed to address opportunity gaps by supporting students who are historically underserved and underrepresented in technology disciplines.

Amazon Future Engineer – Since 2021, up to $46 million in scholarships has been awarded to 1150 students through this program. In the past year, more than 2.1 million students received over 17 million hours of STEM education, literacy, and career exploration courses through this and other Amazon philanthropic education programs in the United States. I was able to speak to one such session last year and it was an amazing experience:

Free Cloud Training – In late 2020 we set a goal of helping 29 million people grow their tech skills with free cloud computing training by 2025. We worked hard and met that target a year ahead of time!

There’s More To Do
Despite all of this work and progress, there’s still more to be done. The future is definitely not evenly distributed: over half a billion students cannot be reached by digital learning today.

We believe that Generative AI can amplify the good work that socially-minded edtech organizations, non-profits, and governments are already doing. Our goal is to empower them to build new and innovative digital learning systems that can amplify their work and allow them to reach a bigger audience.

With the launch of the AWS Education Equity Initiative, we want to help pave the way for the next generation of technology pioneers as they build powerful tools, train foundation models at scale, and create AI-powered teaching assistants.

We are committing up to $100 million in cloud technology and comprehensive technical advising over the next five years. The awardees will have access to the portfolio of AWS services and technical expertise so that they can build and scale learning management systems, mobile apps, chatbots, and other digital learning tools. As part of the application process, applicants will be asked to demonstrate how their proposed solution will benefit students from underserved and underrepresented communities.

As I mentioned earlier, our partners are already doing a lot of great work in this area. For example:

Code.org has already used AWS to scale their free computer science curriculum to millions of students in more than 100 countries. With this initiative, they will expand their use of Amazon Bedrock to provide an automated assessment of student projects, freeing up educator time that can be use for individual instruction and tailored learning.

Rocket Learning focuses on early childhood education in India. They will use Amazon Q in QuickSight to enhance learning outcomes for more than three million children.

I’m super excited about this initiative and look forward to seeing how it will help to create and educate the next generation of technology pioneers!

— Jeff;

Implementing a computing curriculum in Telangana

Post Syndicated from Fiona Coventry original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/implementing-a-computing-curriculum-in-telangana/

Last year we launched a partnership with the Government of Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TGSWREIS) in Telangana, India to develop and implement a computing curriculum at their Coding Academy School and Coding Academy College. Our impact team is conducting an evaluation. Read on to find out more about the partnership and what we’ve learned so far.

Aim of the partnership 

The aim of our partnership is to enable students in the school and undergraduate college to learn about coding and computing by providing the best possible curriculum, resources, and training for teachers. 

Students sit in a classroom and watch the lecture slides.

As both institutions are government institutions, education is provided for free, with approximately 800 high-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds currently benefiting. The school is co-educational up to grade 10 and the college is for female undergraduate students only. 

The partnership is strategically important for us at the Raspberry Pi Foundation because it helps us to test curriculum content in an Indian context, and specifically with learners from historically marginalised communities with limited resources.

Adapting our curriculum content for use in Telangana

Since our partnership began, we’ve developed curriculum content for students in grades 6–12 in the school, which is in line with India’s national education policy requiring coding to be introduced from grade 6. We’ve also developed curriculum content for the undergraduate students at the college. 

Students and educators engage in digital making.

In both cases, the content was developed based on an initial needs assessment — we used the assessment to adapt content from our previous work on The Computing Curriculum. Local examples were integrated to make the content relatable and culturally relevant for students in Telangana. Additionally, we tailored the content for different lesson durations and to allow a higher frequency of lessons. We captured impact and learning data through assessments, lesson observations, educator interviews, student surveys, and student focus groups.

Curriculum well received by educators and students

We have found that the partnership is succeeding in meeting many of its objectives. The curriculum resources have received lots of positive feedback from students, educators, and observers.

Students and educators engage in digital making.

In our recent survey, 96% of school students and 85% of college students reported that they’ve learned new things in their computing classes. This was backed up by assessment marks, with students scoring an average of 70% in the school and 69% in the college for each assessment, compared to a pass mark of 40%. Students were also positive about their experiences of the computing and coding classes, and particularly enjoyed the practical components.

“My favourite thing in this computing classes [sic] is doing practical projects. By doing [things] practically we learnt a lot.” – Third year undergraduate student, Coding Academy College

“Since their last SA [summative assessment] exam, students have learnt spreadsheet [concepts] and have enjoyed applying them in activities. Their favourite part has been example codes, programming, and web-designing activities.” – Student focus group facilitator, grade 9 students, Coding Academy School

However, we also found some variation in outcomes for different groups of students and identified some improvements that are needed to ensure the content is appropriate for all. For example, educators and students felt improvements were needed to the content for undergraduates specialising in data science — there was a wish for the content to be more challenging and to more effectively prepare students for the workplace. Some amendments have been made to this content and we will continue to keep this under review. 

In addition, we faced some challenges with the equipment and infrastructure available. For example, there were instances of power cuts and unstable internet connections. These issues have been addressed as far as possible with Wi-Fi dongles and educators adapting their delivery to work with the equipment available.

Our ambition for India

Our team has already made some improvements to our curriculum content in preparation for the new academic year. We will also make further improvements based on the feedback received. 

Students and educators engage in digital making.

The long-term vision for our work in India is to enable any school in India to teach students about computing and creating with digital technologies. Over our five-year partnership, we plan to work with TGSWREIS to roll out a computing curriculum to other government schools within the state. 

Through our work in Telangana and Odisha, we are learning about the unique challenges faced by government schools. We’re designing our curriculum to address these challenges and ensure that every student in India has the opportunity to thrive in the 21st century. If you would like to know more about our work and impact in India, please reach out to us at [email protected].

We take the evaluation of our work seriously and are always looking to understand how we can improve and increase the impact we have on the lives of young people. To find out more about our approach to impact, you can read about our recently updated theory of change, which supports how we evaluate what we do.

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Introduce the Code Editor into your school

Post Syndicated from Joanne Vincent original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/code-editor-for-education/

Since we first launched the Code Editor, a free online tool designed to support young people  as they learn text-based programming, we’ve been excited to hear how educators have been trying it out in their classrooms. 

“I used the Code Editor with my computer science students yesterday and it worked a dream! Students were able to write and run code without any issues.” 

– Head of Computer Science

The Code Editor is designed for learning, rather than for professional use, and is informed by our understanding of pedagogy and computing education. It can be accessed from a web browser without installing any additional software. 

Earlier this year, we announced that we’d be introducing classroom management features and we’re now pleased to confirm that we’ve launched the beta version of Code Editor for Education with school accounts. You can be the first to try out the new features, together with the many schools who have chosen to pre-register their school accounts.

Simple and easy classroom management

We’ve kept the educator interface clean, simple, and easy to use. School owners can invite other teachers to join, add students, organise students into classes, and help students reset their passwords quickly. Educators can create coding projects to share with students and view their work.

Example image of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Code Editor, showcasing its classroom management features.

All features, totally free

We’ve added these classroom management features because one of the key problems we’ve seen educators face over the past months has been the lack of an affordable tool to teach text-based coding in the classroom. We will always provide the Code Editor and all of its features to educators and students for free. 

Safe and private by design

We take safeguarding seriously, providing visibility of student work at all times, as well as features such as the ability to report a concern. In line with best practices protecting children online, we minimise data capture so that we have just enough to keep students safe. 

Future developments 

As the platform is currently in beta, we’d love to hear what you think of the new classroom management features — please send us your feedback. 

We’ll be actively looking to develop new features over the coming months. Such features are set to include an extended set of Python libraries, custom instructions that sit alongside starter code projects and teacher-to-student feedback capabilities. All new developments will be informed by ongoing educator feedback. 

Find out more and register for a free school account.

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The Computing Curriculum: Three global perspectives

Post Syndicated from Dan Fisher original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/the-computing-curriculum-global-perspectives/

Across continents and cultural contexts, our free Computing Curriculum serves as a common thread that connects educators. Read the stories of 3 educators who share their thoughts on the curriculum’s application, adaptability, and the impact it’s had on their educational settings. 

I’m Freda, and I co-founded a non-profit organisation called Waloyo in South Africa.

Photo of Freda, co-founder of the non-profit organisation called Waloyo.

Coming from a background of technology consulting, I know the value of computing education. I have a real drive to teach young kids coding so they can get ahead and find jobs in our digital economy.

Our role at Waloyo is to work with non-profit organisations that work with young people and want to expand their services to include computing skills training. Waloyo trains non-profit facilitators, who in turn teach computing skills to youth between the ages of 6 and 18. A unique challenge is that the majority of facilitators we train don’t have any previous computing experience. The resources we use need to be clear and easy to follow.

What I really love about The Computing Curriculum resources is the facilitator guides.

Our initial plan was to run the training programmes after school and outside the school curriculum, but we were getting requests from schools to support them too. South Africa doesn’t have a national computing curriculum, so there aren’t many subject specialist teachers. So we looked for curriculum resources from other countries to support our work and that’s how we found The Computing Curriculum. 

In rural Africa where we work, students have low levels of exposure to computers and computing. So whether they are 6 or 18 years old, we usually start with Scratch. The younger kids then continue with Scratch and the older kids move quickly on to Python as they build confidence.

Screenshot of Scratch 3 interface

What I really love about The Computing Curriculum resources is the facilitator guides. They fit in well with our process of training NGO facilitators to work directly with the kids. I love the comprehensiveness and flexibility of what your curriculum provides to enable this method of delivery.

So far we’ve launched 3 programmes in communities in South Africa, impacting around 150 young people, and it’s worked beautifully. It’s phenomenal to see how excited the kids get when the computer does what they want it to do!

I’m Al, and I’ve been a secondary science teacher since 1991.

Photo of Al out hiking in rocky terrain.

For the past 13 years, I’ve taught in international schools. Two years ago, I decided to retrain in teaching computing. My wife and I are currently teaching in Kazakhstan. I now teach at primary level but still handle some secondary classes. For primary, there’s significant time pressure, especially with extra lessons for the local language, making it challenging to fit computing into the schedule.

The private schools where I work are starting to implement the UK computer science curriculum. At one of the schools, they have a robotics course which has given rise to a misconception that everything in computing is about robotics! My role, therefore, involves expanding the concept of robotics to include a broader range of computing activities and finding efficient ways to integrate these new materials into the curriculum with minimal effort from the staff. I focus on selecting appropriate units to fit into what the schools are already doing rather than implementing a comprehensive new program.

Workshop attendees at a table.
Photo of educators collaborating on various projects at a desk, with laptops open displaying the Scratch Editor.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s curriculum resources are valuable because they provide comprehensive lists of programs and ideas that I can adapt for my colleagues. I adapt resources to make them more accessible for primary teachers, simplifying and customising them for ease of use.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s curriculum resources are valuable because they provide comprehensive lists of programs and ideas that I can adapt for my colleagues.

Once students understand that computing is a tool for developing skills rather than just passive consumption, they take ownership of their learning which boosts their confidence. Culturally relevant materials are particularly effective, especially in diverse international classrooms. Adapting resources to be culturally relevant and incorporating students’ examples enhances their usefulness and impact. The resources are excellent, but by tailoring them, they can be even more effective, particularly in an international context with diverse nationalities and learning concepts.

Head of ICT at an international school in Egypt

In a computing classroom, a boy looks down at a keyboard.

As Head of Department, I am responsible for what all the different age groups learn, from year 1 to year 12. We use the Cambridge International (CIE) curriculum, so I was looking for supplementary resources that build from the basics, have a clear progression map, and complement the resources we already had.

With The Computing Curriculum, it is easy to pick out individual lesson resources to use. I love that it doesn’t need a licence and that the students don’t face any problems when they download it to practise at home. I’m covering curriculums for both computing and digital literacy, so I use resources that are relevant to my curriculum maps.

With The Computing Curriculum, it is easy to pick out individual lesson resources to use.

In some schools, their idea of an ICT lesson is getting students to play games, use Word documents, make PowerPoint presentations, and that’s it. But this generation of students love coding and making their own games. So instead of playing the game, we teach them how to develop a game and how to add the characters themselves.

From year 1 to year 2, students take part in a wide range of computing activities and develop a lot of new skills. They find these skills amazing. It makes them feel engaged, excited, and that they are doing something valuable.

Using The Computing Curriculum 

These educators’ stories show how easy it is to adapt our Computing Curriculum to your unique context, enhancing students’ technical skills and inspiring creativity, critical thinking, and a passion for problem-solving. We look forward to continuing this journey with these and other educators as they transform computing education for their learners.

If you’re looking for new computing resources to teach with, why not give The Computing Curriculum a try? You can also read our culturally relevant pedagogy research that Al mentions in his interview.

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Free online course on understanding AI for educators

Post Syndicated from Mac Bowley original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/free-online-course-on-understanding-ai-for-educators/

To empower every educator to confidently bring AI into their classroom, we’ve created a new online training course called ‘Understanding AI for educators’ in collaboration with Google DeepMind. By taking this course, you will gain a practical understanding of the crossover between AI tools and education. The course includes a conceptual look at what AI is, how AI systems are built, different approaches to problem-solving with AI, and how to use current AI tools effectively and ethically.

Image by Mudassar Iqbal from Pixabay

In this post, I will share our approach to designing the course and some of the key considerations behind it — all of which you can apply today to teach your learners about AI systems.

Design decisions: Nurturing knowledge and confidence

We know educators have different levels of confidence with AI tools — we designed this course to help create a level playing field. Our goal is to uplift every educator, regardless of their prior experience, to a point where they feel comfortable discussing AI in the classroom.

Three computer science educators discuss something at a screen.

AI literacy is key to understanding the implications and opportunities of AI in education. The course provides educators with a solid conceptual foundation, enabling them to ask the right questions and form their own perspectives.

As with all our AI learning materials that are part of Experience AI, we’ve used specific design principles for the course:

  • Choosing language carefully: We never anthropomorphise AI systems, replacing phrases like “The model understands” with “The model analyses”. We do this to make it clear that AI is just a computer system, not a sentient being with thoughts or feelings.
  • Accurate terminology: We avoid using AI as a singular noun, opting instead for the more accurate ‘AI tool’ when talking about applications or ‘AI system’ when talking about underlying component parts. 
  • Ethics: The social and ethical impacts of AI are not an afterthought but highlighted throughout the learning materials.

Three main takeaways

The course offers three main takeaways any educator can apply to their teaching about AI systems. 

1. Communicating effectively about AI systems

Deciding the level of detail to use when talking about AI systems can be difficult — especially if you’re not very confident about the topic. The SEAME framework offers a solution by breaking down AI into 4 levels: social and ethical, application, model, and engine. Educators can focus on the level most relevant to their lessons and also use the framework as a useful structure for classroom discussions.

The SEAME framework gives you a simple way to group learning objectives and resources related to teaching AI and ML, based on whether they focus on social and ethical aspects (SE), applications (A), models (M), or engines (E, i.e. how AI works).

You might discuss the impact a particular AI system is having on society, without the need to explain to your learners how the model itself has been trained or tested. Equally, you might focus on a specific machine learning model to look at where the data used to create it came from and consider the effect the data source has on the output. 

2. Problem-solving approaches: Predictive vs. generative AI

AI applications can be broadly separated into two categories: predictive and generative. These two types of AI model represent two vastly different approaches to problem-solving. 

People create predictive AI models to make predictions about the future. For example, you might create a model to make weather forecasts based on previously recorded weather data, or to recommend new movies to you based on your previous viewing history. In developing predictive AI models, the problem is defined first — then a specific dataset is assembled to help solve it. Therefore, each predictive AI model usually is only useful for a small number of applications.

Seventeen multicoloured post-it notes are roughly positioned in a strip shape on a white board. Each one of them has a hand drawn sketch in pen on them, answering the prompt on one of the post-it notes "AI is...." The sketches are all very different, some are patterns representing data, some are cartoons, some show drawings of things like data centres, or stick figure drawings of the people involved.
Rick Payne and team / Better Images of AI / Ai is… Banner / CC-BY 4.0

Generative AI models are used to generate media (such as text, code, images, or audio). The possible applications of these models are much more varied because people can use media in many different kinds of ways. You might say that the outputs of generative AI models could be used to solve — or at least to partially solve — any number of problems, without these problems needing to be defined before the model is created.

3. Using generative AI tools: The OCEAN process

Generative AI systems rely on user prompts to generate outputs. The OCEAN process, outlined in the course, offers a simple yet powerful framework for prompting AI tools like Gemini, Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT. 

Three groups of icons representing people have shapes travelling between them and a page in the middle of the image. The page is a simple rectangle with straight lines representing data. The shapes traveling towards the page are irregular and in squiggly bands.
Yasmine Boudiaf & LOTI / Better Images of AI / Data Processing / CC-BY 4.0

The first three steps of the process help you write better prompts that will result in an output that is as close as possible to what you are looking for, while the last two steps outline how to improve the output:

  1. Objective: Clearly state what you want the model to generate
  2. Context: Provide necessary background information
  3. Examples: Offer specific examples to fine-tune the model’s output
  4. Assess: Evaluate the output 
  5. Negotiate: Refine the prompt to correct any errors in the output

The final step in using any generative AI tool should be to closely review or edit the output yourself. These tools will very quickly get you started but you’ll always have to rely on your own human effort to ensure the quality of your work. 

Helping educators to be critical users

We believe the knowledge and skills our ‘Understanding AI for educators’ course teaches will help any educator determine the right AI tools and concepts to bring into their classroom, regardless of their specialisation. Here’s what one course participant had to say:

“From my inexperienced viewpoint, I kind of viewed AI as a cheat code. I believed that AI in the classroom could possibly be a real detriment to students and eliminate critical thinking skills.

After learning more about AI [on the course] and getting some hands-on experience with it, my viewpoint has certainly taken a 180-degree turn. AI definitely belongs in schools and in the workplace. It will take time to properly integrate it and know how to ethically use it. Our role as educators is to stay ahead of this trend as opposed to denying AI’s benefits and falling behind.” – ‘Understanding AI for educators’ course participant

All our Experience AI resources — including this online course and the teaching materials — are designed to foster a generation of AI-literate educators who can confidently and ethically guide their students in navigating the world of AI.

You can sign up to the course for free here: 

I want to sign up

A version of this article also appears in Hello World issue 25, which will be published on Monday 23 September and will focus on all things generative AI and education.

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Celebrating one year of Project Cybersafe Schools

Post Syndicated from Zaid Zaid original https://blog.cloudflare.com/celebrating-one-year-of-project-cybersafe-schools


August 8, 2024, is the first anniversary of Project Cybersafe Schools, Cloudflare’s initiative to provide free security tools to small school districts in the United States.

Cloudflare announced Project Cybersafe Schools at the White House on August 8, 2023 as part of the Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit hosted by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. The White House highlighted Cloudflare’s commitment to provide free resources to small school districts in the United States. Project Cybersafe Schools supports eligible K-12 public school districts with a package of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions – for free, and with no time limit. These tools help eligible school districts minimize their exposure to common cyber threats.

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. One way we do that is by supporting organizations that are particularly vulnerable to cyber threats and lack the resources to protect themselves through projects like Project Galileo, the Athenian Project, the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project, Project Safekeeping, and most recently, Project Secure Health.

Schools are vulnerable to cyber attacks

In Q2 2024, education ranked 4th on the list of most attacked industries. Between 2016 and 2022, there were 1,619 K-12 cyber incidents. Since we launched Project Cybersafe Schools in August 2023, there have been a number of cyber attacks targeting hundreds of thousands of students. In August 2023, Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland fell victim to a ransomware attack that affected the personal data of more than 100,000 people. Then, in December 2023, a Cincinnati area school district suffered a cyber attack that resulted in the loss of $1.7M. In 2024, there have been numerous incidents affecting K-12 schools across the U.S., including in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington state. The smallest school districts are often the most vulnerable because of a lack of resources or capacity. Sometimes, the person responsible for cybersecurity does so in addition to another primary role, whether as a teacher, coach or administrator.

We are proud of our impact, but we can do more

There are about 14,000 school districts in the United States, and about 9,800 of them have fewer than 2,500 students. All 9,800 of those small public school districts are eligible for Project Cybersafe Schools (for free, and with no time limit – see below for all the details), and we want to help as many as possible. We are proud of the number of school districts that we have onboarded since August 2023, but it is not enough. We want to do more, and we can onboard more school districts by getting the word out about Project Cybersafe Schools. When we published an update in December 2023 encouraging school districts to sign up before the holiday break, we saw a noticeable bump in the number of inquiries from eligible school districts. If you work at a small school district in the United States, we encourage you to see if you qualify for this program.

Nearly 30 states have school districts now enrolled in Project Cybersafe Schools, representing every region of the country. Since we launched the program, we have onboarded nearly 120 qualifying school districts. As a result, more than 160,000 students, teachers, and staff are protected by Cloudflare’s cloud email security to protect against a broad spectrum of threats including Business Email Compromise, multichannel phishing, credential harvesting, and other targeted attacks. These school districts are also receiving protection against Internet threats with DNS filtering by preventing users from reaching unwanted or harmful online content like ransomware or phishing sites.

Attacks prevented by Project Cybersafe Schools in 2024

When the White House launched its National Cybersecurity Strategy in March 2023, Acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden noted in her remarks that “we expect school districts to go toe-to-toe with transnational criminal organizations largely by themselves. This isn’t just unfair; it’s ineffective.” Cloudflare agrees, and this is one of the reasons we launched Project Cybersafe Schools after conversations with officials from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Education, and the White House about how we could help to protect small school districts in the United States from cyber threats.

Year to date, Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution has identified and blocked more than 2 million malicious emails targeting the school districts enrolled in Project Cybersafe Schools. This represents roughly 3.5% of their total email traffic, though certain school districts are attacked at a far higher rate. In one district, malicious emails blocked by Cloudflare represented more than 15% of all email traffic.

Another challenge facing these schools is the large volume of spam emails sent their way. While some of this spam is promotional and not overtly malicious, it can often be used in a variety of attacks. Project Cybersafe Schools has prevented more than 2.2 million spam emails from clogging the inboxes of the school districts who have enrolled.

According to CISA, more than 90% of all cyber attacks begin with a phishing email. So helping these school districts secure their email inboxes is a critical factor in reducing their cyber risk. With email providing a relatively high success rate for gaining initial access, it’s no surprise that attackers continue to exploit email users with increasingly sophisticated and evasive techniques that bypass native security controls. And the consequences of these attacks can be severe: ​​Recovery time can extend from two all the way up to nine months – that’s almost an entire school year.

Here’s what a few Project Cybersafe Schools participants have to say about the impact of the program on their school district:

“What Cloudflare’s Project Cybersafe Schools has allowed us to do as a rural district is add a missing layer of protection to our devices, providing a previously missing and unique layer of security even off our secure network. Where other options would cost us somewhere in the thousands, we are now able to secure devices for free using one of the simplest and scalable platforms, featuring one of the easiest learning curves I’ve worked with. Cloudflare’s feature set as a whole for districts are unparalleled and integration is a must for schools looking to add an additional layer of protection to their network architecture, which by my estimation should be everyone.” – Wyatt Determan, Technology Specialist (HLWW Public School District, Minnesota)

“Since implementing the Cybersafe Schools program as our secure email gateway, we’ve saved over $5,000 per year compared to similar solutions. The program has effectively filtered out numerous malicious emails, greatly enhancing our security posture. Its seamless integration and user-friendly interface make it easy for our IT team to manage. Cybersafe Schools has become a critical part of our IT infrastructure, ensuring a safe and secure educational environment.” – Paul Strout, Network Manager (Regional School Unit RSU71, Belfast, Maine)

What Zero Trust services are available?

Eligible K-12 public school districts in the United States have access to a package of enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity services for free and with no time limit – there is no catch and no underlying obligations. Eligible organizations will benefit from:

  • Email Protection: Safeguards inboxes with cloud email security by protecting against a broad spectrum of threats including malware-less Business Email Compromise, multichannel phishing, credential harvesting, and other targeted attacks.
  • DNS Filtering: Protects against Internet threats with DNS filtering by preventing users from reaching unwanted or harmful online content like ransomware or phishing sites and can be deployed to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

Who can apply?

To be eligible, Project Cybersafe Schools participants must be:

  • K-12 public school districts located in the United States
  • Up to 2,500 students in the district

If you think your school district may be eligible, we welcome you to contact us to learn more.  Please fill out the form today.

For schools or school districts that do not qualify for Project Cybersafe Schools, Cloudflare has other packages available with educational pricing. If you do not qualify for Project Cybersafe Schools, but are interested in our educational services, please contact us at [email protected].