Supporting educators to provide high-quality computing education has always been integral to our mission. In 2018, we began creating more learning resources for formal education settings. The UK government had recently announced future investment in supporting computing educators. Schools in England were offering the national Computing curriculum established in 2014. (In the USA, a more common term for prescribed education content is ‘standards’.)
England’s Computing curriculum requires that all learners be taught the subject between ages 5 and 16, and it consists of only 25 statements outlining expectations for learners. To accompany this curriculum, we started developing a framework to help us describe the subject of Computing, and in particular the common threads running through it.
A 2012 report by the Royal Society presented the breadth of computing by dividing it into three areas: information technology, computer science, and digital literacy. Although this goes some way to describe computing as a discipline, in our view this model creates artificial divides between aspects of the subject according to whether they are seen as more or less technical. Our more holistic view of computing recognises that concepts and skills within the subject are far more interconnected.
Principles for our taxonomy
When we set out to develop our framework, the goal was to provide a way to look at and describe the subject of Computing as a set of interconnected topics; the framework doesn’t define standards or curricula. There are, of course, many ways of organising the subject matter, implemented through exam specifications, textbooks, schemes of learning, and various progression guides. For our framework, we reviewed examples of each of these, from England and beyond, and decided on some organisational principles:
Our framework should describe the whole of Computing, incorporating computer science, information technology, and digital literacy
The framework should be applicable across primary and secondary education, meaning it should be useful for categorising the knowledge encountered by all learners, from five-year-olds to our oldest secondary school students
While inspired by England’s national curriculum, the framework should be independent of any particular exam specification and capable of adaptation to new curricula
The framework should represent Computing as a discipline that combines a broad mixture of concepts and skills
Developing the taxonomy
Following these principles, we identified ten content themes, or strands, that thread through a learner’s journey in Computing education. We call this framework representing the knowledge and skills that make up the subject our Computing taxonomy. As the Foundation is part of the consortium that established the National Centre for Computing Education in England, our taxonomy became a cornerstone of the work of the Centre, providing a common language to describe Computing in English schools.
The 11 content strands we’ve identified for the subject of Computing.
Computing is, of course, a constantly evolving field and as such, our taxonomy evolves with it. Since 2018 we’ve iterated our taxonomy to incorporate new things we’ve learned, for example relating to the rapid developments of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in recent years. AI now is a significant area of study and represented as its own strand in our current taxonomy, bringing the number of strands up to eleven:
Effective use of tools
Safety and security
Design and development
Impact of technology
Computing systems
Networks
Creating media
Algorithms and data structures
Programming
Data and information
Artificial intelligence
Given the interconnected nature of Computing, we embrace a best-fit approach to content categorisation, choosing the most appropriate strand(s) for each idea. In developing our Computing taxonomy, we determined that four of the strands (the horizontal strands in the diagram) were best taught interwoven with the others, in context rather than as discrete topics. A good example of this is the strand ‘Safety and security’, which focuses on supporting learners to realise the benefits of digital technology without putting themselves and others at risk. While it would be possible to teach this strand as one discrete set of lessons, revisiting it throughout a learner’s journey provides regular reinforcement as well as grounding in the context of other strands.
Within the strands, we have also identified progressive learning outcomes for each stage of learning. These learning outcomes are illustrative of the kinds of knowledge and understanding that learners could develop in each area of Computing. They are not prescriptive and instead aim to illustrate the wide applications of the discipline.
Coming soon: The Big Book of Computing Content
On 24 October, we will publish The Big Book of Computing Content. Framed by our taxonomy, The Big Book of Computing Content presents our work so far in describing the diverse range of concepts and skills that comprise Computing. It also includes the illustrative learning outcomes we’ve identified.
The Big Book of Computing Content will be available in print and as a free PDF download; if you subscribe now, you’ll receive the PDF in your inbox on publication day.
Share your thoughts on our taxonomy
We hope our taxonomy and the new Big Book enable you to reflect on the breadth of Computing and resonate with your teaching. Please share your reflections, in the comments below or by tagging us on social media, if you’d like to help us develop the taxonomy further.
I am delighted to announce a new collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and a leading AI company, DeepMind, to inspire the next generation of AI leaders.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s mission is to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. Our vision is that every young person — whatever their background — should have the opportunity to learn how to create and solve problems with computers.
With the rapid advances in artificial intelligence — from machine learning and robotics, to computer vision and natural language processing — it’s increasingly important that young people understand how AI is affecting their lives now and the role that it can play in their future.
Experience AI is a new collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and DeepMind that aims to help young people understand how AI works and how it is changing the world. We want to inspire young people about the careers in AI and help them understand how to access those opportunities, including through their subject choices.
Experience AI
More than anything, we want to make AI relevant and accessible to young people from all backgrounds, and to make sure that we engage young people from backgrounds that are underrepresented in AI careers.
The program has two strands: Inspire and Experiment.
Inspire: To engage and inspire students about AI and its impact on the world, we are developing a set of free learning resources and materials including lesson plans, assembly packs, videos, and webinars, alongside training and support for educators. This will include an introduction to the technologies that enable AI; how AI models are trained; how to frame problems for AI to solve; the societal and ethical implications of AI; and career opportunities. All of this will be designed around real-world and relatable applications of AI, engaging a wide range of diverse interests and useful to teachers from different subjects.
Experiment: Building on the excitement generated through Inspire, we are also designing an AI challenge that will support young people to experiment with AI technologies and explore how these can be used to solve real-world problems. This will provide an opportunity for students to get hands-on with technology and data, along with support for educators.
Our initial focus is learners aged 11 to 14 in the UK. We are working with teachers, students, and DeepMind engineers to ensure that the materials and learning experiences are engaging and accessible to all, and that they reflect the latest AI technologies and their application.
As with all of our work, we want to be research-led and the Raspberry Pi Foundation research team has been working over the past year to understand the latest research on what works in AI education.
Next steps
Development of the Inspire learning materials is underway now, and we will release the whole set of resources early in 2023. Throughout 2023, we will design and pilot the Experiment challenge.
If you want to stay up to date with Experience AI, or if you’d like to be involved in testing the materials, fill in this form to register your interest.
The summer months are an exciting time at the Foundation: you can feel the buzz of activity as we prepare for the start of a new school year in many parts of the world. Across our range of fantastic (and free) programmes, everyone works hard to create new and improved resources that help teachers and students worldwide.
We’ve asked some of our programme leads to tell you what’s new in their respective areas. We hope that you’ll come away with a good idea of the breadth and depth of teacher support that’s on offer. Is there something we aren’t doing yet that we should be? Tell us in the comments below.
Sway Grantham has been at the forefront of writing resources for our Teach Computing Curriculum over the last three years. The Curriculum is part of the wider National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) and provides hundreds of free classroom resources for teachers, from Key Stage 1 to 4. Each resource includes lesson plans, slides, activity sheets, homework, and assessments. Since we published the Curriculum in 2020, all lessons have been reviewed and updated at least once. Managing the process of continuously improving these resources is a key part of Sway’s work.
Hi Sway, what updates have you been making to the Teach Computing Curriculum to help teachers this year?
We make changes to the Teach Computing Curriculum all the time! However, specific things we are excited about ahead of the new school year are updates to how our content is presented on the website so that it’s really easy to see which unit you should be teaching in each half term. We’ve also renamed some of the units to make it clearer what they cover. And to help Key Stage 3 teachers launch Computing in secondary school with skills that are foundational for progress through the requirements of the Key Stage 3 curriculum, we’ve updated the first Year 7 unit, now called Clear messaging in digital media.
You recently asked for teachers’ feedback as part of an annual impact survey. What did you find out?
We are still in the process of looking through the feedback in detail, but I can share some high-level insights. 96% of teachers who responded to the survey gave a score between 7 and 10 for recommending that other teachers use the Teach Computing Curriculum. Over 80% reported that the Teach Computing Curriculum has improved their confidence, subject knowledge, and the quality of their teaching ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’. Finally, over 90% of respondents said the Curriculum is effective at supporting teachers, developing teachers’ subject knowledge, and saving teachers’ time.
We are grateful to the 907 people who took part in the survey! You have all helped us to ensure the Curriculum has a positive impact on teachers and learners throughout England and beyond.
James, why is it so important for teachers to underpin their classroom practice with best-practice pedagogical approaches?
In order to teach any area of the curriculum effectively, educators need to understand both the content they are teaching and the most effective ways to deliver that content. Computing is a broad discipline made up of lots of inter-connected knowledge. Different areas of the subject benefit from different approaches, and this may vary depending on the experience of the learners and the context within which they are learning. Understanding which approaches are best suited to different content helps educators support learners effectively.
Computing education research related to school-aged learners is still in its early stages compared to other subjects, and new approaches and pedagogies are being developed, tested, and evaluated. Staying aware of these developments is important for educators and that’s why it’s something the Foundation is dedicated to supporting.
What do you have in store for teachers this year?
This year we continue to share best practice and hear from educators applying new ideas in their classroom through Hello World magazine and podcast. Educators should also keep a look out for our second Hello World special edition exploring the breadth and depth of Computing. To get hold of a copy of this later this year, make sure you’re subscribed to Hello World.
Allen, what has gone into the making of these new GCSE resources?
I think one of the biggest and most important things that’s been evident to me while working on this project is the care and thought that our content creators have put into each and every piece they worked on. To the end user it will simply be material on a web page, but sitting behind each page are countless discussions involving the whole team around how to present certain facts, concepts, or processes. Sometimes these discussions have even caused us to reevaluate our own thinking around how we deliver computer science content. We have debated the smallest things such as glossary terms, questioning every word to make sure we are as clear and concise as possible. Hopefully the care, expertise, and dedication of the team shines through in what really is a fantastic source of information for teachers and learners.
What do you have in store for teachers and learners this year?
With 96% of teachers and 88% of students reporting that the content is of high quality and easily accessible, we still need to continue to support them to ultimately enable learners to achieve their potential. Looking ahead, there is still lots of work to do to make sure Isaac offers the best possible user experience. And we plan to add a lot more questions to really bolster the numbers of questions at varying levels of difficulty for learners. This will have the added benefit of being useful for any teachers wanting to up-skill too! A massive strength of the platform is its questions, and we are really keen to give as wide a range of them as possible.
Tamasin Greenough Graham leads the team at Code Club, our global network of free, in-school coding clubs for young people aged 9 to 13. In Code Clubs, participants learn to code while having fun getting creative with their new skills. Clubs can be run by anyone who wants to help young people explore digital technologies — you don’t need coding experience at all. The Code Club team offers everything you need, including coding projects with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, and lots of resources to help you support your club members. They are also on hand to answer your questions.
Tamasin, what kind of support can teachers expect when they decide to set up a Code Club?
Running a Code Club really is simple and a lot of fun! We have free training to suit everyone, including webinars that guide you through getting started, a self-study online course you can take to prepare for running your Code Club, and drop-in online Q&A sessions where you can chat about your questions to our friendly team or to other educators who run clubs.
Once you have registered your Code Club, you’ll get access to an online dashboard packed with useful resources: from guidance on preparing and delivering your first session, to certificates to celebrate your club members’ successes, and unplugged activities for learners to do away from the screen.
What experience do you need to run a Code Club?
You don’t need to have any coding experience to run a club, as we provide a giant range of fun coding projects and support materials that can be easily followed by educators and young people alike. You just need to support and encourage your young coders, and you can get in touch with the Code Club team if you need any help!
The project paths we offer provide a framework for young coders to develop their skills, whatever their starting point is. Each path starts with three Explore projects, where coders learn new coding concepts and skills. The next two Design projects in the path help them practise these skills through creating fun games, animations, or websites. The final Invent project of the path gives a design brief, and based on this learners have the space to use their new skills and their creativity to code something based on their own ideas.
Our project paths start with the basics of Scratch, and work through to creating websites in HTML and CSS, and to text-based coding in Python. For more advanced or adventurous coders, we also offer project paths to make physical projects with Raspberry Pi Pico, create 3D models in Blender, or even build 3D worlds in Unity.
Why is it important to teach coding to primary-aged children?
Lots of primary-aged children use digital technology every day, whether that be a TV, a phone, playing video games, or a computer at school. But they don’t have to be just consumers of technology. Through learning to code, young people become able to create their own technology, and our projects are designed to help them see how these new skills allow them to express themselves and solve problems that matter to them.
What young people do with their new skills is up to them – that’s the exciting part! Computing skills open paths to a wide range of projects and work where digital skills are helpful. And while learning coding is fun and useful, it also helps learners develop a many other important skills to do with problem solving, teamwork, and creativity.
Martin O’Hanlon heads the team that produces our free online courses programme. If you’re looking for continued professional development in computer science, look no further than to our more than 35 courses. (For teachers in England, a large number of the courses count towards the NCCE’s Primary, Secondary, or GCSE certificates.) Curated in 13 curated learning pathways, all of our courses provide high-quality training that you can take at home, at a time that suits you.
Martin, what can learners expect from taking one of our online courses?
Our online computing courses are free and have something for everyone who is interested in computing. We offer pathways for learning to program in Python or Scratch, teaching computing in the classroom, getting started with physical computing, and many more.
We vary the materials and formats used in our courses, including videos, written articles, quizzes, and discussions to help learners get the most out of the experience. You will find a lot of practical activities and opportunities to practice what you learn. There are loads of opportunities to interact with and learn from others who are doing the course at the same time as you. And educators from the Raspberry Pi Foundation join the courses during facilitation periods to give their advice, support, and encouragement.
What is the idea behind the course pathways?
We have a large catalogue of online training courses, and the pathways give learners a starting point. They group the courses into useful collections, offering a recommended path for everyone, whether that’s people who are brand-new to computing or who have identified a gap in their existing computing skills or knowledge.
Our aim is that these pathways help people find the right course at the right point in their computing journey.
Thanks, everyone.
One more thing…
We’re also very excited to work on new research projects this school year, to help deepen the computing education community’s understanding of how to teach the subject in schools. Are you a primary teacher in England who is interested in making computing culturally relevant for your pupils?
We’re currently looking for teachers to take part in our research project around primary school culturally adapted resources, running from October 2022 to July 2023. Find out more about what taking part involves.
From experience, being connected to a community of fellow computing educators is really important, especially given that some members of the community may be the only computing educator in their school, district, or country. These professional connections enable educators to share and learn from each other, develop their practice, and importantly reduce any feelings of isolation.
It was great to see the return of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Annual Conference to an in-person event this year, and I was really excited to be able to attend.
Our small Raspberry Pi Foundation team headed to Chicago for four and a half days of meetups, professional development, and conversations with educators from all across the US and around the world. Over the week our team ran workshops, delivered a keynote talk, gave away copies of Hello World magazine, and signed up many new subscribers. You too can subscribe to Hello World magazine for free at helloworld.cc/subscribe.
We spoke to so many educators about all parts of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work, with a particular focus on the Hello World magazine and podcast, and of course The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. In collaboration with CSTA, we were really proud to be able to provide all attendees with their own physical copy of this very special edition.
It was genuinely exciting to see how pleased attendees were to receive their copy of TheBig Book of Computing Pedagogy. So many came to talk to us about how they’d used the digital copy already and their plans for using the book for training and development initiatives in their schools and districts. We gave away every last spare copy we had to teachers who wanted to share the book with their colleagues who couldn’t attend.
Don’t worry if you couldn’t make it to the conference, The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy is available as a free PDF, which due to its Creative Commons licence you are welcome to print for yourself.
Another goal for us at CSTA was to support and encourage new authors to the magazine in order to ensure that Hello World continues to be the magazine for computing educators, by computing educators. Anyone can propose an article idea for Hello World by completing this form. We’re confident that every computing educator out there has at least one story to tell, lessons or learnings to share, or perhaps a cautionary tale of something that failed.
We’ll review any and all ideas and will support you to craft your idea into a finished article. This is exactly what we began to do at the conference with our workshop for writers led by Gemma Coleman, our fantastic Hello World Editor. We’re really excited to see these ideas flourish into full-blown articles over the coming weeks and months.
Our week culminated in a keynote talk delivered by Sue, Jane, and James, exploring how we developed our 12 pedagogy principles that underpin The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, as well as much of the content we create at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. These principles are designed to describe a set of approaches that educators can add to their toolkit, giving them a shared language and the agency to select when and how they employ each approach. This was something we explored with teachers in our final breakout session where teachers applied these principles to describe a lesson or activity of their own.
We found the experience extremely valuable and relished the opportunity to talk about teaching and learning with educators and share our work. We are incredibly grateful to the entire CSTA team for organising a fantastic conference and inviting us to participate.
Discover more with Hello World — for free
Subscribe now to get each new Hello World straight to your digital inbox, for free! And if you’re based in the UK and do paid or unpaid work in education, you can subscribe for free print issues.
Introducing children to computing concepts from a young age can help develop their interest and attachment to the subject. While parents might wonder what the best tools and resources are for this, primary and K1–5 educators also need to know what approaches work with their learners.
‘Teaching computing to 5- to 11-year-olds’ is one of the new course pathways we’ve designed to help educators spark young people’s interest in the subject. Our online courses are made by a team of writers, videographers, illustrators, animators, copy editors, presenters, and subject matter experts. They work together over months of production to create high-quality educational video content for participants all over the world.
This course pathway offers advice and practical activities to:
Support young people to create and solve problems with technology
Promote the relevance of computing in young people’s lives
The nine courses included give you a comprehensive understanding of teaching computing to younger learners (5- to 11-year-olds). All the courses have been written by a team of subject matter experts, education professionals, and teachers. Some of the courses cover a specific topic, such as programming or physical computing, while others help educators reflect on their teaching practice.
With Scratch, young people can learn how to program their own games, animations, stories, and more!
All of the courses include a range of ideas to use in your own programming sessions. The activities will help you to introduce concepts like computer networks and the internet to young learners in a relatable way. There are also activities to help learners progress within a topic, such as moving from a block-based programming language like Scratch to a text-based one like Python.
What will I gain from the courses?
The courses are an opportunity to:
Discover new computing activities
Get support from our team of course facilitators
Meet other educators from around the world!
Do I need any previous experience with computing?
These courses will give you everything you need to teach computing to young learners. No computing experience is required.
There is also no specific order in which you need to complete the courses. We want educators to complete the courses in an order that makes sense to them.
If you are new to teaching computing, ‘Get started teaching computing in primary schools’ is the place to start. The four-week course will encourage you to think about why it’s important for your learners to build their understanding around computing. You’ll discover how to support learners to become digital makers who can use technology to solve problems. Everyone who registers on the course will have access to an action plan to help implement what they have learnt into their teaching practice.
Who is the pathway for?
These are free courses for anyone, anywhere, who is interested in teaching young people about computing.
How much time will I spend on each course?
All of the courses take between two and four weeks to complete, based on participants spending two hours a week on a course. You will have free access to each course for the length of time it takes to complete it. For example, if it’s a two week course, like ‘Creating an inclusive classroom: approaches to supporting learners with SEND in computing’, you will have two weeks of free access to the course.
We have learned a lot from experience and from learner feedback, and we want to share this knowledge with others. We’re also aware there’s always more to learn from people across the computing education community. That’s one reason we’re continually working to broaden the range of educators we work with. Another is that we want all learners to see themselves represented in our educational materials, because everyone belongs in computer science.
RPF staff and the Teach Online participants
To make progress with all these goals, we ran a pilot programme for educators called Teach Online at the end of 2021 and the start of 2022. Through Teach Online, we provided twelve educators with training, opportunities, and financial and material support to help them with creating online educational content, particularly videos.
Over five online sessions and a final in-person day, we trained them in not only the production of educational videos, but also some of the pedagogy behind it. The pilot programme has now finished, and we thought we’d share some of the key points from the sessions with you in the wider community.
Learning to create a great online learning experience
When you learn new skills and knowledge, it’s important to think about how you apply these. For this reason, a useful question you can use throughout the learning process is “Why?”. So as you think about how to create the best online learning experience, ask yourself in different contexts throughout the content design and production:
Why am I using this style of video to illustrate this topic?
Why am I presenting these ideas in this order?
Why am I using this choice of words?
For example, it’s easy to default to creating ‘talking head’ videos featuring one person talking directly to the camera. But you should always ask why — what are the reasons for using a ‘talking head’ style. Instead, or in addition, you can make videos more engaging and support the learning experience by:
Turning the video into an interview
Adding other camera angles or screencasts to focus on demonstrations
Cutting away to B-roll footage (additional video that can provide context or related action, while the voiceover continues) or to still images that help connect a concept to concrete examples
Teach Online participants explored different ways to make their videos engaging
Planning is key
By planning your content carefully instead of jumping into production right away, you can:
Better visualise what your video should look like by creating a storyboard
Keep learners engaged by deliberately splitting learning up into smaller chunks while still keeping a narrative flow between them
Develop your learners’ understanding of key computing concepts by using semantic waves to unpack and repack concepts
The Teach Online participants told us that they particularly enjoyed learning more about planning videos:
“I now understand that a little planning can make the difference between a mediocre online learning experience and a professional-looking valuable learning experience.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
“Planning the session using a storyboard is so helpful to visualise the actual recording.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
Storyboards are a great option to plan online learning experiences
Considering equity, diversity, and inclusion
We are committed to making computing and computer science accessible and engaging, so we embed measures to improve equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout our free learning and teaching resources, including the Teach Online programme. It’s important not to leave this aspect of creating educational content as an afterthought: you can only make sure that your content is truly as equitable and inclusive as you can make it if you address this at every stage of your process. As an added bonus, many ways of making your content more accessible not only benefit learners with specific needs, but support and engage all of your audience so everyone can learn more easily.
Best practices that you can use while creating online content include:
While modelling coding, explicitly leaving in moments where you make mistakes and need to fix them, to show that this is normal
Connecting with your learner audience
One of video’s key advantages is the ability to immediately connect with the audience. To help with that, you can try to talk directly to a single viewer, using “you” and “I” rather than “we”. You can also show off your personality in the presentation slides you use and the backgrounds of your videos.
“[I will use my learning from the programme] by adapting teaching and learning to actively engage learners.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
It’s important to find your own personal presenting style. There is not one perfect way to present, and you should experiment to find how you are best able to communicate with your viewers. How formal or informal will you be? Is your delivery calm or energetic? Whatever you decide, you may want to edit your script to better fit your style. A practical tip for doing this is to read your video scripts aloud while you are writing them to spot any language that feels awkward to you when spoken.
“It was really great to try the presenting skills, and I learned a lot about my style.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
Connecting with each other
Throughout the Teach Online programme, we helped participants create a community with each other. Finding your own community can give you the support that you need to create, and help you continue to develop your knowledge and skills. Working together is great, whether that’s collaborating in-person locally, or online via for example the CAS forums or social media.
“I very much liked the diverse group of educators in this programme, and appreciated everyone sharing their experiences and tips.” – Educator who participated in our Teach Online programme
The Teach Online graduate have told us about the positive impact the programme has had on their teaching in their own contexts. So far we’ve worked with graduates to create Isaac Computer Science videos covering data structures, high- and low-level languages, and string handling.
What do you want to know about creating online educational content?
There is a growing need for online educational content, particularly videos — not only to improve access to education, but also to support in-person teaching. By investing in training educators, we help diversify the pool of people working in this area, improve the confidence of those who would like to start, and provide them with the skills and knowledge to successfully create great content for their learners.
In the future we’d also like to support the wider community of educators with creating online educational content. What resources would you find useful? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
You may have heard a lot about coding and how important it is for children to start learning about coding as early as possible. Computers have become part of our lives, and we’re not just talking about the laptop or desktop computer you might have in your home or on your desk at work. Your phone, your microwave, and your car are all controlled by computers, and those computers need instructions to tell them what to do. Coding, or computer programming, involves writing those instructions.
If children discover a love for coding, they will have an avenue to make the things they want to make; to write programs and build projects that they find useful, fun, or interesting. So how do you give your child the opportunity to learn about coding? We’ve listed some free resources and suggested activities below.
Scratch Junior
If you have a young child under about 7 years of age, then a great place to begin is with ScratchJr. This is an app available on Android and iOS phones and tablets, that lets children learn the basics of programming, without having to worry about making mistakes.
Code Club World
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has developed a series of activities for young learners, on their journey to developing their computing skills. Code Club World provides a platform for children to play with code to design their own avatar, make it dance, and play music. Plus they can share their creations with other learners.
“You could have a go too and discover Scratch together. The platform is designed for complete beginners and it is great fun to play with.”
Carol Thornhill, Engineering Science MA, Mathematics teacher
Scratch
For 7- to 11-year-old children, Scratch is a good way to begin their journey in coding, or to progress from ScratchJr. Like ScratchJr, Scratch is a block-based language, allowing children to assemble code to produce games, animations, stories, or even use some of the add-ons to interact with electronic devices and explore physical computing.
A girl with a Scratch project she has coded.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has hundreds of Scratch projects that your child can try out, but the best place to begin is with our Introduction to Scratch path, which will provide your child with the basic skills they need, and then encourage them to build projects that are relevant to them, culminating in their creation of their own interactive ebook.
Your child may never tire of Scratch, and that is absolutely fine — it is a fully functioning programming language that is surprisingly powerful, when you learn to understand everything it can do. Another advantage of Scratch is that it provides easy access to graphics, sounds, and interactivity that can be trickier to achieve in other programming languages.
Python
If you’re looking for more traditional programming languages for your child to progress on to, especially when they reach 12 years of age or beyond, then we like to direct our young learners to the Python programming language and to the languages that the World Wide Web is built on, particularly HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
An animation coded using Python.
Our Python resources cover the basics of using the language, and then progress from there. Python is one of the most widely used languages when it comes to the fields of artificial intelligence and data science, and we have resources to support your child in learning about these fascinating aspects of technology. Our projects can even introduce your child to the world of electronics and physical computing with activities that use the inexpensive Raspberry Pi Pico, and a handful of electronic components, enabling your kids to create a wide variety of art installations and useful gadgets.
“Trying Python doesn’t mean you can’t go back to Scratch or switch between Scratch and Python for different purposes. I still use Scratch for some projects myself!”
Tracy Gardner, Computer Science PhD, former IBM Software Architect and currently a project writer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Python is a great text-based programming language for young people to learn.
Coding projects
On our coding tutorials website we have many different projects to help your child learn coding and digital making. These range from beginner resources like the Introduction to Scratch path to more advanced activities such as the Introduction to Unity path, where children can learn how to make 3D worlds and games.
“Our new project paths can be tackled by young creators on their own, without adult intervention. Paths are structured so that they build skills and confidence in the early stages, and then provide more open-ended tasks and inspirational ideas that creators can adapt or work from.”
Rik Cross, BSc (Hons), PGCE, former teacher and Director of Informal Learning at the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Web development
The Web is integral to many of our lives, and we believe that it is important for children to have an understanding of the technology that drives it. That is why we have an Introduction to the Web path that allows children to develop their own web pages, focusing on the kinds of webpages that they want to build, be that sending a greeting card, telling a story, or creating a showcase of their projects.
It’s empowering for children to learn to how the websites they visit are created with code.
Coding clubs
Coding clubs are a great place for children to have fun and become more confident with coding, where they can learn through making and share their creations with each other. The Raspberry Pi Foundation operates the world’s largest network of coding clubs — CoderDojo and Code Club.
“I have a new group of creators at my Code Club every year and my favourite part is when they realise they really can let their imagination run wild. You want to make an animation where a talking pineapple chases a snowman — absolutely. You want to make a piece of scalable art out of 1000 pixelated cartoon musical instruments — go right ahead. If you can code it, you can make it ”
Liz Smart, Code Club and CoderDojo mentor, former Solutions Architect and project writer for the Raspberry Pi Foundation
At Code Club and CoderDojo, many young people enjoy teaming up to code projects together.
Coding challenges
Once your child has learnt some of the basics, they may enjoy entering a coding challenge! The European Astro Pi Challenge programme allows young people to write code and actually have it run on the International Space Station, and Coolest Projects gives children a chance to showcase their projects from across the globe.
A girl with her coded creation at an in-person Coolest Projects showcase.
Free resources
No matter what technology your child wants to engage with, there is a wealth of free resources and materials available from organisations such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Scratch Foundation, that prepare young people for 21st century life. Whether they want to become professional software engineers, tinker with some electronics, or just have a play around … encourage them to explore some coding projects, and see what they can learn, make, and do!
Author: Marc Scott, BSc (Hons) is a former Science, Computer Science, and Engineering teacher and the Content Lead for Projects at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Issue 19 of our free magazine Hello World, written by and for the computing education community, focuses on the interaction between sustainability and computing, from how we can interact with technology responsibly, to its potential to mitigate climate change.
To give you a taste of this brand-new issue, here is primary school teacher Peter Gaynord’s article about his experience of using an environmental case study to develop a cross-curricular physical computing unit that gives his learners a real-life context.
Peter Gaynord.
Real-life problem solving
The prospect of developing your own unit of work from scratch can feel very daunting. With the number of free resources available, it begs the question, why do it? Firstly, it gives you the opportunity to deliver computing that is interwoven with the rest of your curriculum. It also naturally lends itself to a constructionist approach to learning through meaningful engagement with real-world problem-solving. In this article, I am going to share my experience of developing a ten-lesson unit of physical computing for students aged nine to ten that is linked to the more general topic of the environment.
To engage children in the process of problem-solving, it is important that the problem is presented as a real and meaningful one. To introduce the topic of the environment, we showed pupils a video of the Panama Canal, including information about the staggering amount of CO2 that is saved by ships taking this route instead of the alternative, longer routes that use more fuel. However, we explained that because of the special geographical features, a moving bridge needed to be constructed over the canal. The students’ challenge was first to design a solution to the problem, and then to make a working model.
One bridge model from Peter’s class.
The model would use physical computing as part of the solution to the problem. The children would program a single-geared motor using a Crumble microcontroller to slowly lift and lower the bridge by the desired amount. We decided to issue a warning to drivers that the road bridge was about to close using a Sparkle, a programmable LED. Ultimately, the raising and lowering of the bridge would happen automatically when a ship approached. For this purpose, we would use an ultrasonic sensor to detect the presence of the ship.
Building the required skills
To develop the skills required to use the Crumble microcontroller, we led some discrete computing lessons based largely on the Teach Computing Curriculum’s ‘Programming A — Selection in physical computing’ unit. In these lessons, the children developed the skill of sensing and responding differently to conditions using the selection programming construct. They learnt this key concept alongside controlling and connecting the motor, the Sparkle, and the ultrasonic sensor.
Physical computing allows learners to get hands-on.
For students to succeed, we also had to teach them skills from other subjects, and consider at what stage it would be most useful to introduce them. For example, before asking children to document their designs, we first needed to teach the design technology (DT) objectives for communicating ideas through sketches. Most other DT objectives that covered the practical skills to make a model were interwoven as the project progressed. At the end of the project, we guided the children through how to evaluate their design ideas and reflect on the process of model making. Before pupils designed their solutions, we also had to introduce some science for them to apply to their designs. We covered increasing forces using levers, pulleys, and gears, as well as the greenhouse effect and how burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.
Another bridge model made in Peter’s class.
It is very important not to specify a solution for students at the beginning, otherwise the whole project becomes craft instead of problem-solving. However, it is important to spend some time thinking about any practical aspects of the model building that may need extra scaffolding. Experience suggested that it was important to limit the scale of the children’s models. We did this by showing them a completed central bridge span and later, guiding the building of this component so that all bridges had the same scale. It also turned out to be very important that the children were limited in their model building to using one single-geared motor. This would ensure that all children engaged with actively thinking about how to utilise the lever and pulley system to increase force, instead of relying on using more motors to lift the bridge.
As always, you’ll find this new issue of Hello World packed with resources, ideas, and insights to inspire your learners and your own classroom practice:
Portraits of scientists who apply artificial intelligence models to sustainability research
Research behind device-repair cafés
A deep dive into the question of technology obsolescence
And much more
All issues of Hello World as available as free PDF downloads. Subscribe to never miss a digital issue — and if you’re an educator in the UK, you can subscribe to receive free print copies in the post.
PS: US-based educators, if you’re at CSTA Annual Conference in Chicago this month, come meet us at booth 521 and join us at our sessions about writing for Hello World, the Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, and more. We look forward to seeing you there!
With our online courses programme, launched in 2017, we made it our mission to provide computing educators with the best possible free training we can design. Five years on, here are some of the key stats about the courses’ impact:
We’ve produced and launched 35 free online courses
We’ve created over 650 educational course videos
More than 234,000 learners have participated in the courses
Designed and created in-house, each and every course is a real cross-team effort that involves a lot of careful planning and a number of different stages. Here we’re taking you behind the scenes to show you how we make our courses, introduce you to the people involved, and explain how we ensure our courses are of high quality.
But first, here’s some quick answers to questions you may have:
Our free online courses — key questions answered
What are the courses?
They are online training courses to help you learn about computing and computing education. The courses are hosted on the FutureLearn website. They are asynchronous, meaning you can take them whenever and wherever you want.
Are the courses free?
Yes! All our courses are free when you sign up for time-limited access, which gives you full access to the learning materials for the complete course duration. FutureLearn also has a paid-for ‘unlimited’ option, where you receive a certificate for each course you take.
Are the courses right for me?
They are aimed at educators, particularly classroom teachers, but they are also beneficial to anyone who wants to learn more about computing.
How long does a course take?
To help you structure your learning, our courses are divided into three or four weeks, but it’s up to you how quickly you work through them. You can complete a course in one afternoon, or spread your learning out and study for 30 minutes a day over three or four weeks. This flexibility makes it easy to fit a course into a busy schedule.
What goes into creating an engaging online course?
Creating our online courses is a team effort involving writers, videographers, illustrators, animators, copy editors, presenters, and subject matter experts working together over months of production. The entire process is guided by our online course producers, Martin O’Hanlon, Ross Exton, and Michael Conterio, who know a thing or two about creating high-quality learning experiences. We spoke to them about what it takes to create an engaging course.
The educators at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. On screen: Ross Exton. Left to right in person: Michael Conterio, Martin O’Hanlon.
Hi guys. You’ve created courses on a wide range of computing subjects. How do you decide what the focus of your next course is going to be?
Martin: We are driven by the needs of teachers. “What are teachers telling us they want to learn? Or what are the gaps in the curriculum where our learners need additional support?”
For example, our Introduction to Machine Learning and AI course was introduced as a result of feedback from teachers that while the subject wasn’t necessarily on the curriculum, they felt underprepared to answer questions from students or provide context when teaching other topics.
How do you then go about planning it out and turning that plan into an actual course structure?
Michael: Working with the course authors, we’ll generally agree on the big topics we want to cover or questions that we want to answer. We’ll often also have individual elements that we want to fit in somewhere, for example an activity involving making a learning resource more accessible. From there it’s a case of taking the bigger topics and working out how we can split them up into smaller chunks, until we get down to individual learning activities.
Ross: But then we’ll end up shuffling things around until we are happy — not only that we’ve got everything that we wanted to cover, but that the overall structure makes sense. We often talk about the ‘narrative’ of a course.
What is your approach to pedagogy in online courses?
Martin: At the Raspberry Pi Foundation we have a set of 12 pedagogy principles that we use through our learning resources (including online courses). We take particular care to lead with concepts, model processes, and activities; add variety for our learners; and include opportunities to create projects.
Learn more about the 12 principles in the free special edition of Hello World, The Big book of Computing Pedagogy, downloadable in PDF format.
Can you tell us about some of the pitfalls with course writing that you’ve learned along the way?
Michael: Because the learner is not present, you have to be incredibly precise with instructions as you can’t help learners directly as they are working through the content. And even if you think something is obvious, it’s easy for learners to accidentally miss an instruction, so it’s generally good to try to keep them together rather than spread out.
Martin: Luckily, it is often possible to tell from comments that learners have shared when something is hard to understand so we can improve future runs of the course.
How important is the media you add to the courses, like animations and videos? What is the process for creating this type of content?
Ross: It’s essential! It brings the abstract concepts of computing to life. The media in our courses helps our learners to visualise the ideas we’re presenting in ways that are engaging and relatable.
As we’re writing the course, we capture every creative idea that will best support our learners in gaining the knowledge and skills that they need. From ‘how-to’ guides with live coding, to physical computing demonstrations, or animations of robots, we think carefully about each image and video and how we’re not just tellingthe learner something, but showingthem.
We then work with a brilliantly talented team of illustrators, animators, videographers, and presenters to create all of that media.
And… action! We film all the video content for courses in-house, working closely with the educators who present the content.
There are lots of opportunities for social learning within the courses. Can you explain more about its importance and how we integrate it?
Ross: Social learning is a really important part of our online courses experience. Over the past year we have made significant investment to make it easier for participants to share programs they’ve written as part of their learning, for example, and for facilitators to provide support.
Martin: It is important people have the opportunity to share their learning with others. This is something often lost when taking an online course and it can feel like you are ‘on your own’.
In the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s online courses learners are given the opportunity to ask questions, share what they have created, and provide their own insight in the comments. Educators from the Foundation facilitate the courses — responding to comments and providing advice is a big part of what they do.
Thank you Martin, Michael, and Ross.
What new online course would you like us to create? Tell us in the comments below.
Connecting face to face with educators around the world is a key part of our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and it’s something that we’ve sorely missed doing over the last two years. We’re therefore thrilled to be joining over 1000 computing educators in the USA at the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Annual Conference in Chicago in July.
Developing and sharing effective computing pedagogy is our theme for CSTA 2022. We’ll be talking to you about our 12 pedagogy principles, laid out in The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, available to download for free.
An exciting piece of news is that everyone attending CSTA 2022 will find a free print copy of the Big Book in their conference goodie bag!
We’re really looking forward to sharing and discussing the book and all our work with US educators, and to seeing some familiar faces. We’re also hoping to interview lots of old and new friends about your approaches to teaching computing and computer science for future Hello World podcast episodes.
Your sessions with us
Our team will also be running a number of sessions where you can join us to learn, discuss, and prepare lesson plans.
Semantic Waves and Wavy Lessons: Connecting Theory to Practical Activities and Back Again
Thursday 14 July, 9am–12pm: Pre-conference workshop (booking required) with James Robinson and Jane Waite
If you enjoy explaining concepts using unplugged activities, analogy, or storytelling, then this practical pre-conference session is for you. In the session, we’ll introduce the idea of semantic waves, a learning theory that supports learners in building knowledge of new concepts through careful consideration of vocabulary and contexts. Across the world, this approach has been successfully used to teach topics ranging from ballet to chemistry — and now computing.
You’ll learn how this theory can be applied to deliver powerful explanations that connect abstract ideas and concrete experiences. By taking part in the session, you’ll gain a solid understanding of semantic wave theory, see it in practice in some freely available lesson plans, and apply it to your own planning.
Write for a Global Computing Community with Hello World Magazine
Friday 15 July, 1–2pm: Workshop with Gemma Coleman
Do you enjoy sharing your teaching ideas, successes, and challenges with others? Do you want to connect with a global community of over 30,000 computing educators? Have you always wanted to be a published author? Then come along to this workshop session.
Hello World has been going strong for five years — find out how you can become one of its authors.
Every single computing or CS teacher out there has at least one lesson to share, idea to voice, or story to tell. In the session, you’ll discuss what makes a good article with Gemma Coleman, Hello World’s Editor, and you’ll learn top tips for how to communicate your ideas in writing. Gemma will also guide you through writing a plan for your very own article. Even if you’re not sure whether you want to write an article, doing this is a powerful way to reflect on your teaching practice.
Developing a Toolkit for Teaching Computer Science in School
Saturday 16 July, 4–5pm: Keynote talk by Sue Sentance
To teach any subject requires good teaching skills, knowledge about the subject being taught, and specific knowledge that a teacher gains about how to teach a particular topic, to their particular students, in a particular context. Teaching computer science is no different, and it’s a challenge for teachers to develop a go-to set of pedagogical strategies for such a new subject, especially for elements of the subject matter that they are just getting to grips with themselves.
In this keynote talk, our Chief Learning Officer Sue Sentance will focus on some of the 12 pedagogy principles that we developed to support the teaching of computer science. We created this set of principles together with other teachers and researchers to help us and everyone in computing and computer science education reflect on how we teach our learners. Sue will share how we arrived at the principles, and she’ll use classroom examples to illustrate how you can apply them in practice.
Exploring the Hello World Big Book of Computing Pedagogy
Sunday 17 July, 9–10am: Workshop with Sue Sentance
The set of 12 pedagogy principles we’ve developed for teaching computing are presented in our Hello World Big Book of Computing Pedagogy. The book includes summaries, teachers’ perspectives, and lesson plans for each of the 12 principles.
All CSTA attendees will get their own print copy of the Big Book, and in this practical session, we will use the book to explore together how you can use the 12 principles in the planning and delivery of your lessons. The session will be very hands-on, so bring along something you know you want or need to teach.
See you at CSTA in July
CSTA is now just a month away, and we can’t wait to meet old friends, make new connections, and learn from each other! Come find us at booth 521 or at our sessions to meet the team, discover Hello World magazine and the Hello World podcast, and find out more about our educational work. We hope to see you soon.
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we believe everyone belongs in computer science, and that it is a much more varied field than is commonly assumed. One of the ways we want to promote inclusivity and highlight the variety of skills and interests needed in computer science is through our ‘I belong’ campaign. We do this because the tech sector lacks diversity. Similarly, in schools, there is underrepresentation of students in computing along the axes of gender, ethnicity, and economic situation. (See how researchers describe data from England, and data from the USA.)
These people are role models who demonstrate that everyone belongs in computer science, and that everyone can bring their interests and skills to bear in the field. In this way, we want to show young people that they can do much more with computing than they might think, and to inspire them to consider how computing could be part of their own life and career path.
Meet Salome
Salome is studying Computer Science with Digital Technology Solutions at the University of Leeds and doing a degree apprenticeship with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
“I was quite lucky, as growing up I saw a lot about women in STEM which inspired me to take this path. I think to improve the online community, we need to keep challenging stereotypes and getting more and more people to join, thereby improving the diversity. This way, a larger number of people can have role models and identify themselves with someone currently there.”
“Another thing is the assumption that computer science is just coding and not a wide and diverse field. I still have to explain to my friends what computer science involves and can become, and then they will say, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting, I didn’t know that.’”
Devyani is a third-year degree apprentice at Cisco.
“It was at A level where I developed my programming skills, and it was more practical rather than theoretical. I managed to complete a programming project where I utilised PHP, JavaScript, and phpMyAdmin (which is a database). It was after this that I started looking around and applying for degree apprenticeships. I thought that university wasn’t for me, because I wanted a more practical and hands-on approach, as I learn better that way.”
“At the moment, I’m currently doing a product owner role, which is where I hope to graduate into. It’s a mix between both a business role and a technical role. I have to stay up to speed with the current technologies we are using and developing for our clients and customers, but also I have to understand business needs and ensure that the team is able to develop and deliver on time to meet those needs.”
Omar is a Mexican palaeontologist who uses computer science to study dinosaur bones.
“I try to bring aspects that are very well developed in computer science and apply them in palaeontology. For instance, when digitising the vertebrae, I use a lot of information theory. I also use a lot of data science and integrity to make sure that what we have captured is comparable with what other people have found.”
“What drove me to computers was the fact you are always learning. That’s what keeps me interested in science: that I can keep growing, learn from others, and I can teach people. That’s the other thing that makes me feel like I belong, which is when I am able to communicate the things I know to someone else and I can see the face of the other person when they start to grasp a theory.”
Tasnima is a computer science graduate from Queen Mary University of London, and is currently working as a software engineer at Credit Suisse.
“During the pandemic, one of the good things to come out of it is that I could work from home, and that means working with people all over the world, bringing together every race, religion, gender, etc. Even though we are all very different, the one thing we all have in common is that we’re passionate about technology and computer science. Another thing is being able to work in technology in the real world. It has allowed me to work in an environment that is highly collaborative. I always feel like you’re involved from the get-go.”
“I think we need to also break the image that computer science is all about coding. I’ve had friends that have stayed away from any tech jobs because they think that they don’t want to code, but there’s so many other roles within technology and jobs that actually require no coding whatsoever.”
Aleena is a software engineer who works at a health tech startup in London and is also studying for a master’s degree in AI ethics at the University of Cambridge.
“I do quite a lot of different things as an engineer. It’s not just coding, which is part of it but it is a relatively small percentage, compared to a lot of other things. […] There’s a lot of collaborative time and I would say a quarter or third of the week is me by myself writing code. The other time is spent collaborating and working with other people and making sure that we’re all aligned on what we are working on.”
“I think it’s actually a very diverse field of tech to work in, once you actually end up in the industry. When studying STEM subjects at a college or university level it is often not very diverse. The industry is the opposite. A lot of people come from self-taught or bootcamp backgrounds, there’s a lot of ways to get into tech and software engineering, and I really like that aspect of it. Computer science isn’t the only way to go about it.”
Alice is a final-year undergraduate student of Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Brighton. She is also the winner of the Global Challenges COVID-19 Research Scholarship offered by Santander Universities.
“[W]e need to advertise computer science as more than just a room full of computers, and to advertise computer sciences as highly collaborative. It’s very creative. If you’re on a team of developers, there’s a lot of communication involved.”
“There’s something about computer science that I think is so special: the fact that it is a skill anybody can learn, regardless of who they are. With the right idea, anybody can build anything.”
Help us spread the message that everyone belongs in computer science: share this blog with schools, teachers, STEM clubs, parents, and young people you want to inspire.
You can learn computer science with us
Whether you’re studying or teaching computer science GCSE or A levels in the UK (or thinking about doing so!), or you’re a teacher or student in another part of the world, Isaac Computer Science is here to help you achieve your computer science goals. Our high-quality learning platform is free to use and open to all. As a student, you can register to keep track of your progress. As a teacher, you can sign up to guide your students’ learning.
And for younger learners, we have lots of fun project guides to try out coding and creating with digital technologies.
All young people deserve meaningful opportunities to learn how to create with digital technologies. But according to UNESCO, as much as 40% of people around the world don’t have access to education in a language they speak or understand. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we offer more than 200 free online projects that people all over the world use to learn about computing, coding, and creating things with digital technologies. To make these projects more accessible, we’ve published over 1700 translated versions so far, in 32 different languages. You can check out these translated resources by visiting projects.raspberrypi.org and choosing your language from the drop-down menu.
Two young children in Uganda code on a laptop at a CoderDojo session.
Most of this translation work was completed by an amazing community of volunteer translators. In 2021 alone, learners engaged in more than 570,000 learning experiences in languages other than English using our projects.
So how do we know it’s important to put in the effort to make our projects available in many different languages? Various studies show that learning in one’s first language leads to better educational and social outcomes.
Improved access and attainment for girls
Education policy specialists Chloe O’Gara and Nancy Kendall describe in a USAID-funded guide document (1996, p. 100) that girls living in multilingual communities are less likely to know the official language of school instruction than boys, because girls’ lives tend to be more restricted to home and family, where they have fewer opportunities to become proficient in a second language. These restrictions limit their access to education, and if they go to school, they are more likely to have a limited understanding of the dominant language, and therefore learn less. Observations in research studies (Hovens, 2002; Benson 2002a, 2002b) suggest that making education available in a local language greatly increases female students’ opportunities for educational access and attainment.
In rural India, a group of girls cluster around a computer.
Improved self-efficacy
Research studies conducted in Guinea and Senegal (Clemons & Yerende, 2009) suggest that education in a local language, which is more likely to focus on the learner’s circumstances, community, and learning and development needs, increases the learner’s belief in their abilities and skills, compared to education in a dominant language.
Young people program in Scratch on a Raspberry Pi, at Co-creation Hub, Nigeria.
Improved test scores
Learning in a language other than one’s own has a negative effect on learning outcomes, especially for learners living in poverty. For example, a UNESCO-funded case study in Honduras showed that 94% of pupils learned reading skills if their home language was the same as the language of assessment. In contrast, among pupils who spoke a different language at home, this proportion dropped to 62%. Similarly, a UNESCO-funded case study in Guatemala showed that when students were able to learn in a bilingual environment, attendance and promotion rates increased, while rates of repetition and dropout rates decreased. Moreover, students attained higher scores in all subjects and skills, including the mastery of the dominant language (UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, Policy Paper 24, February 2016).
Three girls in Brazil code on a laptop in a Code Club session.
Improved acquisition of programming concepts
A survey conducted by a researcher from the University of California San Diego showed that non-native English speakers found it challenging to learn programming languages when the majority of instructional materials and technical communications were only available in English (Guo, 2018). Moreover, a computing education research study of the association between local language use and the rate at which young people learn to program showed that beginners who learned to program in a programming language with keywords and environment localised into their primary language demonstrated new programming concepts at a faster rate, compared with beginners from the same language group who learned using a programming interface in English (Dasgupta & Hill, 2017).
You can help with translations and empower young people
It is clear from these studies that in order to achieve the most impact and to benefit disadvantaged and underserved communities, educational initiatives must work to make learning resources available in the language that learners are most familiar with.
By translating our learning resources, we not only support people who have English as a second language, we also make the resources useful for people who don’t speak any English — estimated as four out of every five people on Earth.
If you’re interested in helping us translate our learning resources, which are completely free, you can find out more at rpf.io/translate.
Raspberry Pi Pico is a low-cost microcontroller that can be connected to another computer to be programmed using MicroPython. We think it’s a great tool for exploring physical computing in classrooms and coding clubs. Pico has been available since last year, amid school closures, reopenings, isolation periods, and restrictions for students and teachers. Recently, I spoke to some teachers in England about how their reception of Raspberry Pi Pico, and how they have found using it to teach physical computing to their learners.
This blog post is adapted from issue 18 of Hello World, our free magazine written by computing educators for computing educators.
Extra-curricular engagement
At secondary schools, a key use of Raspberry Pi Pico was in teacher-led lunchtime or after-school clubs. One teacher from a girls’ secondary school in Liverpool described how he introduced it to his Women in Tech club, which he runs for 11- to 12-year-old students for half an hour per week at lunchtime. As this teacher has free reign over the club content and a personal passion for Raspberry Pi, his eventual aim for the club participants was to build a line-following car using Pico.
The group started by covering the basics of Pico, such as connecting it with a breadboard and making LEDs flash, using our ‘Getting started with Raspberry Pi Pico’ project guide. The teacher described how walking into a room with Picos and physical computing kits grabs students’ attention: “It’s massively more engaging than programming Python on a screen… They love the idea of building something physical, like a car.” He has to remind them that phones aren’t allowed at school, as they’re keen to take photos of the flashing lights to show their parents. His overall verdict? “Once the software had been installed, [Picos are] just plug and play. As a tool in school, it gives you something physical, enthuses interest in the subject. If it gets just one person choosing the subject, who wouldn’t have done otherwise, then job done.”
“If it gets just one person choosing the subject, who wouldn’t have done otherwise, then job done.”
Teacher at a Liverpool girls’ secondary school
Another teacher from a school in Hampshire used Picos at an after-school club with students aged 13 to 15. After about six sessions of less than 50 minutes last term, the students have almost finished building motorised buggies. The first two sessions were spent familiarising students with the Picos, making LEDs flash, and using sensors. In the next four sessions, the students made their way through the Pico-focused physical computing unit from our Teach Computing Curriculum. The students worked in pairs, and initially some learners had trouble getting the motors to turn the wheels on their buggies. Rather than giving them the correct code, the teacher gave them duplicate sets of the hardware and suggested that they test each piece in turn to ‘debug’ the hardware. Thus the students quickly worked out what they needed to do to make the wheels turn.
Another key theme that came through in my conversations with teachers was how Raspberry Pi Pico can be used to reinforce learners’ existing computing skills. One teacher I interviewed, from a school in Essex, has been using Picos to teach computing to 12- to 14-year-olds in class, and talked about the potential for physical computing as a pedagogical tool for recapping topics that have been covered before. “If [physical computing] is taught well, it enhances students’ understanding of programming. If they just copy code from the board, it becomes about the kit and not how you solve a problem, it’s not as effective at helping them develop their computational thinking. Teaching Python on Pico really can strengthen existing understanding of using Python libraries and subroutines, as well as passing subroutine arguments.”
“If [physical computing] is taught well, it enhances students’ understanding of programming.”
Teacher at an Essex secondary school
Another teacher I spoke to, working at a Waterlooville school and relatively new to teaching, talked about the benefits of using Pico to teach Python: “It takes some of the anxiety away from computing for some of the younger students and makes them more resilient. They can be wary of making mistakes, and see them as a hurdle, but working towards a tangible output can help some students to see the value of learning through their mistakes.”
This teacher was keen for his students to get a sense of the variety of jobs that are available in the computing sector, and not just in software. He explained how physical computing can demonstrate to students how you can make inputs, outputs, and processing very real: “Give students a Pico and make them thirsty about what they could do with it — the device allows them to interact with it and work out how to bend it to what they want to do. You can be creative in computing without just writing code, you can capture information and output it again in a more useful way.”
“Working towards a tangible output can help some students to see the value of learning through their mistakes.”
Teacher at a Waterlooville school
One of the teachers we spoke to was initially a bit cynical about Pico, but had a much better experience of using it in the classroom than expected: “It’s not such a big progression from block-based microcontrollers to Pico — it could be a good stepping stone between, for example, a micro:bit and a Raspberry Pi computer.”
Why not try out Raspberry Pi Pico in your classroom or club? It might be the engagement booster you’ve been looking for!
Top teacher tips for activities with Raspberry Pi Pico
Prepare to install Thonny (the software we recommend to program Pico) on your school’s or venue’s IT systems, and ask your IT technician for support.
It takes time to unpack devices, connect them, and pack them back up again. Build this time into your plan!
Free learning resources for using Raspberry Pi Pico in your classroom or club
Teachers at state schools in England can borrow physical computing kits with class sets of Raspberry Pi Picos from their local Computing Hub. We’ve made these kits available through our work as part of the National Centre for Computing Education. The Pico kit is perfect for teaching the Pico-focused physical computing unit from our Teach Computing Curriculum.
Qualified US-based educators can still get their hands on 1 of 1000 free Raspberry Pi Pico hardware kits if they sign up to our free course Design, build, and code a rover with Raspberry Pi Pico. This course shows you how to introduce Pico in your classroom. We’ve designed the course on the Pathfinders Online Institute platform, specifically for US-based educators, thanks to our partners at Infosys Foundation USA. These Raspberry Pi Pico kits are also available at PiShop.us.
Since the release of the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller in 2021, we have seen people all over the world come up with creative Pico-based inventions.
The Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller.
Now, thanks to our brand-new and free ‘Introduction to Raspberry Pi Pico’ learning path, young coders can easily join in and make their own cool Pico projects! This free learning path has six guided projects to help kids to independently develop their coding skills, and their skills in physical computing and electronics.
Physical computing is a great way to help young people get creative with coding.
In this post, I’ll tell you about Raspberry Pi Pico, what kids can make by following our free ‘Intro to Pico’ path, and what skills they will be learning.
Meet Raspberry Pi Pico
Raspberry Pi Pico is a physical computing device that is low-cost and easy to use. It’s much smaller than any Raspberry Pi computer, and it needs much less power. That’s because it’s not a full computer but instead a microcontroller. That means Pico is a device that you program by writing code on any computer, and then sending that code to Pico via a USB cable.
Raspberry Pi Pico has GPIO pins (like Raspberry Pi computers do). These pins mean it can interact with different types of physical computing components, such as buttons, buzzers, and LEDs.
In the ‘Intro to Raspberry Pi Pico’ path, we’ve designed new digital making projects specifically using Pico. By following the projects in the path, young people learn to make things with different electronic components. They’ll bring to life their own LED fireflies; they’ll make music with a sound machine and dial (a potentiometer); they’ll look after themselves and people around them by making a mood indicator and a heart rate visualiser. To find out more, visit the path, or scroll to the bottom of this post and click on ‘Details about the projects’.
The specially designed structure of our learning paths helps kids become confident and independent coders and digital makers. Through this project path, we want to show young people what is possible with Raspberry Pi Pico and inspire them to continue their digital making journey beyond the six projects. Seeing tech creations from our amazing community is super special to us, and we would love to hear about what your young coders have made with Pico. Kids can share their projects in the path gallery, or you can tag us on social media if you post photos!
Learning skills and independence with our project paths
While young people make all these Raspberry Pi Pico projects, they will learn the skills and independence to make and code their very own, unique creations with a Pico. We have designed our new project paths to help kids become independent digital makers. As they progress through a path, kids gain new skills, practise what they have learnt, and finally write and follow their own project brief.
Our learning paths help kids develop many of the skills that are important to all coders and digital makers, no matter how much experience they have:
How to turn an idea on paper into a tech creation
How to debug a project
How to combine new information with what they already know about digital making
The learning paths also encourage kids to make projects about the things that matter to them.
Key questions answered
Who is this path for?
We have written the projects in this path with young people around the age of 9 to 13 in mind.
Programs for Raspberry Pi Pico are written in a text-based language called MicroPython. That means a young person who wants to start the ‘Intro to Pico’ path needs to be familiar with typing on a keyboard.
If your kid has never coded in a text-based language before, they could complete our free ‘Introduction to Python‘ project path first, but this is not a prerequisite.
What will young people learn?
To help with the programming aspects of the projects, the instructions in the path tell young people about:
Displaying output
Arithmetic expressions
Importing from a library
While loops
Nested if statements
Defining and calling functions
Events
We still get excited by a flashing LED.
One of the great things about this project path is that it helps young people explore physical computing and electronics. In the ‘Intro to Pico’ path, they’ll use:
Single-colour LEDs
Multi-colour LEDs (so-called RGB LEDs)
Buzzers
Switches (including switches the kids will make out of craft materials!)
Buttons
Potentiometers (dials)
How much time is needed to complete the path?
We’ve designed the path to be completed in around six one-hour sessions, with one hour per project. However, the project instructions encourage kids to upgrade their projects and go further if they wish. This means that they might want to spend a little more time getting their projects exactly as they imagine.
What software is needed for the projects?
Young people need a web browser so they can follow the project instructions. The first two projects in the path provide detailed instructions for how to install the free software needed for the projects.
The projects in the path show you how to program Raspberry Pi Pico using MicroPython in the Thonny software.
What hardware is needed for these projects?
The first step of each project lists what components are needed to create the project. You can purchase a kit from Kitronik or from Pimoroni that includes all of the components used in the path:
‘Intro to Raspberry Pi Pico’ kit list (click here)
1 × soldered Raspberry Pi Pico
1 × USB cable
1 × red LED
1 × blue LED
2 × yellow LEDs
6 × single-colour LEDs (random)
3 × RGB LEDs
15 × 75 ohm resistors (max 220 ohm)
2 × potentiometers
8 × push buttons (optional, these can be made from crafting materials)
15 × pin–socket jumper wires
38 × socket–socket jumper wires
4 × pin–pin jumper wires
What can young people do next?
Explore Python coding with us
If your young coders enjoy MicroPython, they’ll also love our Python learning paths: ‘Introduction to Python‘ and‘More Python‘.Both are structured in the same way as our Pico path, and will help young people learn Python while creating their own visual designs.
Details about the projects in ‘Intro to Raspberry Pi Pico’
The ‘LED firefly’ project introduces creators to Raspberry Pi Pico while they make their first project with a blinking LED. They program the LED with a blink pattern that is common to fireflies in the wild. To upgrade their projects, creators can place their LED firefly into a glass jar to create a twinkling effect.
Explore project 2: Party popper
‘Party popper’ introduces creators to the RGB LED and a buzzer. To form the popper, they craft a pull switch out of kitchen foil and cardboard. When the popper is activated, the RGB LED flashes in their chosen colour, and a ‘tada’ sound plays on the buzzer.
Explore project 3: Beating heart
‘Beating heart’ uses a potentiometer (dial) to control the pulsing speed of an LED. Creators craft their own hearts using red paper and origami before placing the pulsing LED inside. In this way, they create a model of a heart they can use to learn about medicine or to bring to life a favourite toy.
Design project 1: Mood indicator
In the ‘Mood indicator’ project, kids use switches and an RGB LED to create a device that can communicate a need or a mood to another person. This Design project gives young creators lots of opportunities to use their new skills to create something personal to them.
Design project 2: Sound machine
‘Sound machine’ is a project for kids to work with the different tones that a buzzer can make. They can use the buzzer to create sound effects, or to recreate their favourite songs. Once they have decided on their sounds, they can think about how a user of their project might choose to play them.
Invent project: Sensory gadget
This project gives creators that chance to pick their favourite elements of the path to create something totally unique to them. They could make all sorts of sensory gadgets, from a Picosaber to a candle that can be blown out. Creators are encouraged to showcase their creations in the path gallery to give other young makers inspiration.
We’ve been running the Gender Balance in Computing programme of research since 2019, as part of the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) and with various partners. It’s a £2.4 million research programme funded by the Department for Education in England that aims to identify ways to encourage more girls and young women to engage with Computing and choose to study it further. The programme is made up of four separate areas of research, in which we are running a number of interventions.
The first independent evaluation report from the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) on our series of interventions has now been published. It relates to an intervention within the research area ‘Teaching Approach’, evaluating our pilot study of teaching computing to Key Stage 1 children using a storytelling approach. The evaluators from BIT found that this pilot study produced evidence of promise for the storytelling approach. They recommend conducting a full-size trial to test how effective this approach is for engaging female pupils with Computing.
Teaching computing through storytelling
Like many Computing curricula around the world, the English National Curriculum emphasises the importance of teaching Computing through a range of content so that pupils can express themselves and develop their ideas using digital tools. Our ‘Teaching Approach’ project builds on research grounded in sociocultural learning theories that suggest teaching approaches that encourage collaboration and use a variety of contexts can make Computing a more inclusive subject for all learners. Within this project, we are running three different interventions, each with learners of different ages.
Evidence indicates that gender stereotypes around Computing develop early (1). Therefore we designed a trial — the first of its kind in England — to explore a storytelling approach for teaching Computing with younger children (6- to 7-year-olds). A small body of research suggests that using storytelling as a learning context for Computing can be engaging for both boys and girls. Research results indicate that:
Teaching computing through storytelling and story-writing is effective for motivating 11- to 14-year-old girls to learn programming (2)
Children who write computer programs to tell stories see Computing as a subject that is equally as easy or difficult for both boys and girls (3)
In a non-formal learning space, primary-aged girls are more likely to choose a storybook beginner electronics activity rather than open-ended beginner electronics free play (4)
The pilot study and the evaluation methods
As combining evidence from research with older students and in non-formal education is experimental, we designed this storytelling trial as a small pilot study. Our aim was to generate early evidence as to how feasible a teaching approach that uses storytelling might be in the primary Computing classroom.
We recruited 53 schools to take part in the pilot study, which ran from April to July 2021. Many schools were still facing challenges due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and we are very grateful to the teachers and learners who have taken part for their contribution to this important research.
To conduct the study, we created a free online training course, and a scheme of work, for schools to teach Computing concepts to 6- and 7-year olds using a storytelling approach. Over a sequence of the 12 lessons in the scheme of work, pupils used the ScratchJr programming environment to animate their own digital stories and learn about Computing concepts, such as sequence and repetition, linked to elements of stories, such as structure, rhyme, and speech.
To enable the independent evaluation of the effectiveness of the storytelling approach by BIT, schools were allocated either to an intervention group, which used the training course and the storytelling scheme of work, or to a control group, which taught Computing in their usual way and was not made aware that the approach being trialled involved storytelling. For their evaluation, BIT gathered data from both groups to compare them:
They conducted surveys measuring learners’ attitudes toward computing and their intentions to study it in the future
They carried out observations of lessons, interviews with teachers, and discussions with learners
They ran a survey to gather feedback about the trial from teachers
The gathered data was assessed against five categories: evidence of promise, fidelity, acceptability, feasibility, and readiness for trial.
Main findings of the evaluation team
After analysing the data collected from observations, interviews, learner discussions, pupil surveys, and teacher surveys, the key finding of the independent evaluators was that the storytelling teaching approach had evidence of promise, and that it is worthwhile scaling up our intervention for a larger trial with more schools.
The evaluators’ teacher interviews confirmed the early development of gender stereotypes in the classroom. This highlights the importance of introducing Computing to young learners in a way that engages both boys and girls.
“I’ve really noticed how there’s already differences in views of what’s a boy, what’s a girl, the boys are getting in front of me, like, ‘I want a boy car, I don’t want a girl car’. Then we’ve got the other side where we’ve got fairy tales and princesses and, ‘Oh, I’m a bunny. Do you want to play with me?’”
Teacher (evaluation report, p. 22)
Teachers told the evaluators that pupils enjoyed personalising their stories in ScratchJr, and that they themselves felt positive about the use of storytelling to teach computing.
“I think [the storytelling aspect] gives them something real to work through, so it’s not… abstract… I think through the storytelling, they’re able to make it as funny or whatever they want, and it’s also their own interest. [Female student], she dotes on animals, so she’s always having giraffes and all of that, so it’s something that they can make their own connections too… Yes, I did really like the storytelling.”
Teacher (evaluation report, p. 26)
Teacher feedback provided some evidence that the storytelling lessons had equally increased both male and female pupils’ interest, confidence, and skills.
The independent evaluation team advised caution when interpreting the quantitative data from the pupil surveys, due to the small sample size in this pilot study and the high attrition rates caused by coronavirus-related disruptions. We ourselves would like to add that the study raises questions about the reliability of quantitative survey data collected from very young children using Likert scales, BIT’s chosen survey format for this evaluation. Although the evaluators have made some positive steps in creating a new survey suitable for young children, this research instrument may need further testing; the survey results would need to be interpreted in this light, and more research in this area would be recommended.
This intervention was based on one of the teaching approaches for which there was only early evidence of effectiveness, so it is a good outcome to have a larger trial recommended based on our pilot study. It’s often said that research ends up recommending more research, but in this case our small pilot project really does give robust evidence that we should trial the storytelling approach with more schools.
The independent evaluators collected feedback from both teachers and pupils that confirms the storytelling intervention we designed is feasible in the classroom. The feedback also indicates where we can make small adjustments that will refine and develop the training and scheme of work for a larger-scale study (evaluation report, p. 35), and we will consider this feedback carefully. While some teachers suggested that the training be shortened, less experienced teachers highlighted the need to ensure the training introduces teachers to all of the content covered in the lessons. This feedback helps us to better understand how Computing is taught in primary schools, and how this is influenced by the wide variety of experience and subject knowledge that teachers have. Interestingly, in the control group, some of the teachers reported that they also introduced coding to their learners by having them create stories. We would like to conduct further research into how schools introduce young learners to programming, and we’ll be continuing to reflect on how best to offer flexible content for teacher training related to our research studies.
We’re now looking at how to continue to investigate the effectiveness of the storytelling approach through a larger trial, alongside other projects in which we’re exploring female engagement in computing education through our recently established Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre.
More evaluations are on the way for our other studies in the Gender Balance in Computing programme, including:
Two other trials of teaching approaches
Interventions in non-formal education contexts
Trials of approaches to building a sense of belonging in Computing
Research into the impact of timetabling and options evenings
If you would like to stay up-to-date with the research programme, you can sign up to the Gender Balance in Computing newsletter. We will also post our reflections on the projects on this blog when the evaluations are completed.
1 Mulvey, K. L. and Irvin, M. J. (2018). Judgments and reasoning about exclusion from counter-stereotypic STEM career choices in early childhood. Early Child. Res. Q. 44, 220–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.03.016
2 Kelleher, C., Pausch, R. and Kiesler, S. (2007). Storytelling alice motivates middle school girls to learn computer programming. In CHI ’07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1455–1464. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240844
3 Zaidi, R., Freihofer, I. and Childress Townsend, G. (2017). Using Scratch and Female Role Models while Storytelling Improves Fifth-Grade Students’ Attitudes toward Computing. In SIGCSE ’17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 791–792. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3022451
4 McLean, M., & Harlow, D. (2017). Designing inclusive STEM activities: A comparison of playful interactive experiences across gender. In IDC ’17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 567–574. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3078072.3084326
In this article adapted from Hello World issue 18, teacher Babak Ebrahim explains how his school uses a cybersecurity club to increase interest in Computing among girls. Babak is a Computer Science and Mathematics teacher at Bishop Challoner Catholic College Secondary in Birmingham, UK. He is a CAS Community Leader, and works as a CS Champion for the National Centre for Computing Education in England.
Cybersecurity for girls
It is impossible to walk into an upper-secondary computer science lesson and not notice the number of boys compared to girls. This is a common issue across the world; it is clear from reading community forums and news headlines that there is a big gap in female representation in computing. To combat this problem in my school, I started organising trips to local universities and arranging assembly talks for my Year 9 students (aged 13–14). Although this was helpful, it didn’t have as much impact as I expected on improving female representation.
Girls engage in a cryptography activity at the club.
This led me to alter our approach and target younger female students with an extracurricular club. As part of our lower-secondary curriculum, all pupils study encryption and cryptography, and we were keen to extend this interest beyond lesson time. I discovered the CyberFirst Girls Competition, aimed at Year 8 girls in England (aged 12–13) with the goal of influencing girls when choosing their GCSE subjects (qualifications pupils take aged 14–16). Each school can enter as many teams as they like, with a maximum of four girls in each team. I advertised the event by showing a video of the previous year’s attendees and the winning team. To our delight, 19 girls, in five teams, entered the competition.
Club activities at school
To make sure that this wasn’t a one-off event, we started an after-school cybersecurity club for girls. All Computing teachers encouraged their female students to attend. We had a number of female teachers who were teaching Maths and Computing as their second subjects, and I found it more effective when these teachers encouraged the girls to join. They would also help with running the club. We found it to be most popular with Year 7 students (aged 11–12), with 15 girls regularly attending. We often do cryptography tasks in the club, including activities from established competitions. For example, I recently challenged the club to complete tasks from the most recent Alan Turing Cryptography Competition. A huge benefit of completing these tasks in the club, rather than in the classroom, was that students could work more informally and were not under pressure to succeed. I found this year’s tasks quite challenging for younger students, and I was worried that this could put them off returning to the club. To avoid this, I first taught the students the skills that they would need for one of the challenges, followed by small tasks that I made myself over two or three sessions.
For example, one task required students to use the Playfair cipher to break a long piece of code. In order to prepare students for decoding this text, I showed them how the cipher works, then created empty grids (5 x 5 tables) and modelled the technique with simple examples. The girls then worked in teams of two to encrypt a short quote. I gave each group a different quotation, and they weren’t allowed to let other groups know what it was. Once they applied the cipher, they handed the encrypted message to another group, whose job was to decrypt it. At this stage, some would identify that the other group had made mistakes using the techniques, and they would go through the text together to identify them. Once students were confident and competent in using this cipher, I presented them with the competition task, and they then applied the same process. Of course, some students would still make mistakes, but they would realise this and be able to work through them, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Another worthwhile activity in the club has been for older pupils, who are in their second year of attending, to mentor and support girls in the years below them, especially in preparation for participating in competitions.
Trips afield
Other club activities have included a trip to Bletchley Park. As a part of the package, students took part in a codebreaking workshop in which they used the Enigma machine to crack encrypted messages. This inspirational trip was a great experience for the girls, as they discovered the pivotal roles women had in breaking codes during the Second World War. If you’re not based in the UK, Bletchley Park also runs a virtual tour and workshops. You could also organise a day trip to a local university where students could attend different workshops run by female lecturers or university students; this could involve a mixture of maths, science, and computer science activities.
Girls engage in a cryptography activity at the club.
We are thrilled to learn that one of our teams won this year’s CyberFirst Girls Competition! More importantly, the knowledge gained by all the students who attend the club is most heartening, along with the enthusiasm that is clearly evident each week, and the fun that is had. Whether this will have any impact on the number of girls who take GCSE Computer Science remains to be seen, but it certainly gives the girls the opportunity to discover their potential, learn the importance of cybersecurity, and consider pursuing a career in a male-dominated profession. There are many factors that influence a child’s mind as to what they would like to study or do, and every little extra effort that we put into their learning journey will shape who they will become in the future.
What next?
Find out more about teaching cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is the theme of issue 18 of Hello World, available as a free PDF download. IT includes articles, resources, and opinion pieces from educators who share their experience of teaching cybersecurity to learners
We also help you teach cybersecurity by including this topic in the free Teach Computing Curriculum classroom resources for ages 5 to 16, and in the free Isaac Computer Science online learning platform for GCSE and A level.
Find out more about the factors influencing girls’ and young women’ engagement in Computing
At our research seminar series, we welcomed Peter Kemp and Billy Wong last year, who shared results from their study of the demographics of students who choose GCSE Computer Science in England. Watch the seminar recording.
Katharine Childs from our team had summarised the state of research about gender balance in computing. Watch her seminar, or read her report.
Last year, we hosted a panel session to learn from various perspectives on gender balance in computing. Watch the panel recording.
Between September 2021 and March 2022, we’ve been partnering with The Alan Turing Institute to host a series of free research seminars about how to young people about AI and data science.
In the final seminar of the series, we were excited to hear from Stefania Druga from the University of Washington, who presented on the topic of AI literacy for families. Stefania’s talk highlighted the importance of families in supporting children to develop AI literacy. Her talk was a perfect conclusion to the series and very well-received by our audience.
Stefania Druga, University of Washington
Stefania is a third-year PhD student who has been working on AI literacy in families, and since 2017 she has conducted a series of studies that she presented in her seminar talk. She presented some new work to us that was to be formally shared at the HCI conference in April, and we were very pleased to have a sneak preview of these results. It was a fascinating talk about the ways in which the interactions between parents and children using AI-based devices in the home, and the discussions they have while learning together, can facilitate an appreciation of the affordances of AI systems. You’ll find my summary as well as the seminar recording below.
“AI literacy practices and skills led some families to consider making meaningful use of AI devices they already have in their homes and redesign their interactions with them. These findings suggest that family has the potential to act as a third space for AI learning.”
– Stefania Druga
AI literacy: Growing up with AI systems, growing used to them
Back in 2017, interest in Alexa and other so-called ‘smart’, AI-based devices was just developing in the public, and such devices would have been very novel to most people. That year, Stefania and colleagues conducted a first pilot study of children’s and their parents’ interactions with ‘smart’ devices, including robots, talking dolls, and the sort of voice assistants we are used to now.
A slide from Stefania’s AI literacy seminar. Click to enlarge.
Working directly with families, the researchers explored the level of understanding that children had about ‘smart’ devices, and were surprised by the level of insight very young children had into the potential of this type of technology.
In this AI literacy pilot study, Stefania and her colleagues found that:
Children perceived AI-based agents (i.e. ‘smart’ devices) as friendly and truthful
They treated different devices (e.g. two different Alexas) as completely independent
How ‘smart’ they found the device was dependent on age, with older children more likely to describe devices as ‘smart’
AI literacy: Influence of parents’ perceptions, influence of talking dolls
Stefania’s next study, undertaken in 2018, showed that parents’ perceptions of the implications and potential of ‘smart’ devices shaped what their children thought. Even when parents and children were interviewed separately, if the parent thought that, for example, robots were smarter than humans, then the child did too.
A slide from Stefania’s AI literacy seminar. Click to enlarge.
Another part of this study showed that talking dolls could influence children’s moral decisions (e.g. “Should I give a child a pillow?”). In some cases, these ‘smart’ toys would influence the child more than another human. Some ‘smart’ dolls have been banned in some European countries because of security concerns. In the light of these concerns, Stefania pointed out how important it is to help children develop a critical understanding of the potential of AI-based technology, and what its fallibility and the limits of its guidance are.
A slide from Stefania’s AI literacy seminar. Click to enlarge.
AI literacy: Programming ‘smart’ devices, algorithmic bias
Another study Stefania discussed involved children who programmed ‘smart’ devices. She used the children’s drawings to find out about their mental models of how the technology worked.
She found that when children had the opportunity to train machine learning models or ‘smart’ devices, they became more sceptical about the appropriate use of these technologies and asked better questions about when and for what they should be used. Another finding was that children and adults had different ideas about algorithmic bias, particularly relating to the meaning of fairness.
AI literacy: Kinaesthetic activities, sharing discussions
The final study Stefania talked about was conducted with families online during the pandemic, when children were learning at home. 15 families, with in total 18 children (ages 5 to 11) and 16 parents, participated in five weekly sessions. A number of learning activities to demonstrate features of AI made up each of the sessions. These are all available at aiplayground.me.
A slide from Stefania’s AI literacy seminar. Click to enlarge.
The fact that children and parents, or other family members, worked through the activities together seemed to generate fruitful discussions about the usefulness of AI-based technology. Many families were concerned about privacy and what was happening to their personal data when they were using ‘smart’ devices, and also expressed frustration with voice assistants that couldn’t always understand the way they spoke.
A slide from Stefania’s AI literacy seminar. Click to enlarge.
In one of the sessions, with a focus on machine learning, families were introduced to a kinaesthetic activity involving moving around their home to train a model. Through this activity, parents and children had more insight into the constraints facing machine learning. They used props in the home to experiment and find out ways of training the model better. In another session, families were encouraged to design their own devices on paper, and Stefania showed some examples of designs children had drawn.
A slide from Stefania’s AI literacy seminar. Click to enlarge.
This study identified a number of different roles that parents or other adults played in supporting children’s learning about AI, and found that embodied and tangible activities worked well for encouraging joint work between children and their families.
We are excited to announce our second new Python learning path, ‘More Python’, which shows young coders how to add real data to their programs while creating projects from a chart of Olympic medals to an interactive world map. The six guided Python projects in this free learning path are designed to enable young people to independently create their own Python projects about the topics that matter to them.
Two kids are at a laptop with one of our coding projects.
In this post, we’ll show you how kids use the projects in the ‘More Python’ path, what they can make by following the path, and how the path structure helps them become confident and independent digital makers.
Because Python has so much to offer, we have created a second Python path for young people who have learned the basics in the first path. In this new set of six projects, learners will discover new concepts and see how to add different types of real data to their programs.
By following the ‘More Python’ path, young people learn the skills to independently create a data visualisation for a topic they are passionate about in the final project.
Key questions answered
Who is this path for?
We have written the projects in this path with young people around the age of 10 to 13 in mind. To code in a text-based language, a young person needs to be familiar with using a keyboard, due to the typing involved. Learners should have already completed the ‘Introduction to Python’ project path, as they will build on the learning from that path.
How do young people learn with the projects?
Young people need access to a web browser to complete our project paths. Each project contains step-by-step instructions for learners to follow, and tick boxes to mark when they complete each step. On top of that, the projects have steps for learners to:
Reflect on what they have covered in the project
Share their projects with others
See suggestions to upgrade their projects
Young people also have the option to sign up for an account with us so they can save their progress at any time and collect badges.
While learners follow the project instructions in this project path, they write their code into Trinket, a free web-based coding platform accessible in a browser. Each project contains a link to a starter Trinket, which includes everything to get started writing Python code — no need to install any additional software.
This is what Python code on Trinket looks like.
If they prefer, however, young people also have the option of instead writing their code in a desktop-based programming environment, such as Thonny, as they work through the projects.
What will young people learn?
To use data in their Python programs, the project instructions show learners how to:
Create and use lists
Create and use dictionaries
Read data from a data file
The projects support learners as they explore new concepts of digital visual media and:
Create charts using the Python library Pygal
Plot pins on a map
Create randomised artwork
In each project, learners reflect and answer questions about their work, which is important for connecting the project’s content to their pre-existing knowledge.
As they work through the projects, learners see different ways to present data and then decide how they want to present their data in the final project in the path. You’ll find out what the projects are on the path page, or at the bottom of this blog post.
We’ve designed the path to be completed in around six one-hour sessions, with one hour per project, at home, in school, or at a coding club. The project instructions encourage learners to add code to upgrade their projects and go further if they wish. This means that young people might want to spend a little more time getting their projects exactly as they imagine them.
What can young people do next?
Use Unity to create a 3D world
Unity is a free development environment for creating 3D virtual environments, including games, visual novels, and animations, all with the text-based programming language C#. Our ‘Introduction to Unity’ project path for keen coders shows how to make 3D worlds and games with collectibles, timers, and non-player characters.
Take part in Coolest Projects Global
At the end of the ‘More Python’ path, learners are encouraged to register a project they’ve made using their new coding skills for Coolest Projects Global, our free and world-leading online technology showcase for young tech creators. The project they register will become part of the online gallery, where members of the Coolest Projects community can celebrate each other’s creations.
We welcome projects from all young people, whether they are beginners or experienced coders and digital makers. Coolest Projects Global is a unique opportunity for young people to share their ingenuity with the world and with other young people who love coding and creating with digital technology.
In this Explore project, learners discover the power of lists in Python by creating an interactive chart of Olympic medals. They learn how to read data from a text file and then present that data as a bar chart.
Explore project 2: Solar system
In this Explore project, learners create a simulation of the solar system. They revisit the drawing and animation skills that they learned in the ‘Introduction to Python’ project path to produce animated planets orbiting the sun. The animation is based on real data taken from a data file to simulate the speed that the planets move at as they orbit. The simulation is also interactive, using dictionaries to display data about the planets that have been selected.
Explore project 3: Codebreaker
The final Explore project gets learners to build on their knowledge of lists and dictionaries by creating a program that encodes and decodes a message using an Atbash cipher. The Atbash cipher was originally developed in the Hebrew language. It takes the alphabet and matches it to its reverse order to create a secret message. They also create a script that checks how many times certain letters have been used in an encoded message, so that they can discover patterns.
Design project 1: Encoded art
The first Design project allows learners to create fun pieces of artwork by encoding the letters of their name into images, patterns, or drawings. Learners can choose the images that will be produced for each letter, and whether these appear at random or in a geometric pattern.
Learners are encouraged to share their encoded artwork in the community library, where there are lots of fun projects to discover already. In this project, learners apply all of the coding skills and knowledge covered in the Explore projects, including working with dictionaries and lists.
Design project 2: Mapping data
In the next Design project, learners access data from a data file and use it to create location pins on a world map. They have six datasets to choose from, so they can use one that interests them. They can also choose from a variety of maps and design their own pin to truly personalise their projects.
Invent project: Persuasive data presentation
This project is designed to use all of the skills and knowledge covered in this path, and most of the skills from the ‘Introduction to Python’ path. Learners can choose from eight datasets to create data visualisations. They are also given instructions on how to access and prepare other datasets if they want to visualise data about a different topic.
Once learners have chosen their dataset, they can decide how they want it to be displayed. This could be a chart, a map with pins, or a unique data visualisation. There are lots of example projects to provide inspiration for learners. One of our favourites is the ISS Expedition project, which places flags on the ISS depending on the expedition number you enter.
We are delighted to launch our next series of free online seminars, this time on the topic of cross-disciplinary computing, running monthly from May to November 2022. As always, our seminars are for all researchers, educators, and anyone else interested in research related to computing education.
Crossing disciplinary boundaries
What do we mean by cross-disciplinary computing? Through this upcoming seminar series, we want to embrace the intersections and interactions of computing with all aspects of learning and life, and think about how they can help us teach young people. The researchers we’ve invited as our speakers will help us shed light on cross-disciplinary areas of computing through the breadth of their presentations.
At the Raspberry Pi Foundation our mission is to make computing accessible to all children and young people everywhere, and because computing and technology appear in all aspects of our and young people’s lives, in this series of seminars we will consider what computing education looks like in a multiplicity of environments.
Mark Guzdial on computing in history and mathematics
We start the new series on 3 May, and are beyond delighted to be kicking off with a talk from Mark Guzdial (University of Michigan). Mark has worked in computer science education for decades and won many awards for his research, including the prestigious ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education award in 2019. Mark has written hundreds of papers about computer science education, and he authors an extremely popular computing education research blog that keeps us all up to date with what is going on in the field.
Recently, he has been researching the ways in which programming education can be integrated into other subjects, so he is a perfect speaker to start us thinking about our theme of cross-disciplinary computing. His talk will focus on how we can add a teaspoon of computing to history and mathematics classes.
Pratim Sengupta on countering technocentrism
On 7 June, our speaker will be Pratim Sengupta (University of Calgary), who I feel will really challenge us to think about programming and computing education in a new way. He has conducted studies in science classrooms and non-formal learning environments which focus on providing open and engaging experiences for the public to explore code, for example through the Voice your Celebration installation. Recently, he has co-authored a book called Voicing Code in STEM: A Dialogical Imagination (MIT Press, availabe open access).
In Pratim’s talk, he will share his thoughts about the ways that more of us can become involved with code through opening up its richness and depth to a wider public audience, and he will introduce us to his ideas about countering technocentrism, a key focus of his new book. I’m so looking forward to being challenged by this talk.
Yasmin Kafai on curriculum design with e-textiles
On 12 July, we will hear from Yasmin Kafai (University of Pennsylvania), who is another legend in computing education in my eyes. Yasmin started her long career in computing education with Seymour Papert, internationally known for his work on Logo and on constructionism as a theoretical lens for understanding the way we learn computing. Yasmin was part of the team that created Scratch, and for many years now has been working on projects revolving around digital making, electronic textiles, and computational participation.
In Yasmin’s talk she will present, alongside a panel of teachers she’s been collaborating with, some of their work to develop a high school curriculum that uses electronic textiles to introduce students to computer science. This promises to be a really engaging and interactive seminar.
Genevieve Smith-Nunes on exploring data ethics
In August we will take a holiday, to return on 6 September to hear from the inspirational Genevieve Smith-Nunes (University of Cambridge), whose research is focused on dance and computing, in particular data-driven dance. Her work helps us to focus on the possibilities of creative computing, but also to think about the ethics of applications that involve vast amounts of data.
Genevieve’s talk will prompt us to think about some really important questions: Is there a difference in sense of self (identity) between the human and the virtual? How does sharing your personal biometric data make you feel? How can biometric and immersive development tools be used in the computing classroom to raise awareness of data ethics? Impossible to miss!
Sign up now to attend the seminars
Do enter all these dates in your diary so you don’t miss out on participating — we are very excited about this series. Sign up below, and ahead of every seminar, we will send you the information for joining.
As usual, the seminars will take place online on a Tuesday at 17:00 to 18:30 local UK time. Later on in the series, we will also host a talk by our own researchers and developers at the Raspberry Pi Foundation about our non-formal learning research. Watch this space for details about the October and November seminars, which we are still finalising.
Hello World magazine, our free magazine written by computing educators for computing educators, has been running for 5 years now. In the newest issue, Alan O’Donohoe shares his top tips for educators to make the most out of Hello World.
Alan has over 20 years’ experience teaching and leading technology, ICT, and computing in schools in England. He runs exa.foundation, delivering professional development to engage digital makers, supporting computing teaching, and promoting the appropriate use of technology.
Alan’s top tips
Years before there was a national curriculum for computing, Hello World magazines, or England’s National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE), I had ambitious plans to overhaul our school’s ICT curriculum with the introduction of computer science. Since the subject team I led consisted mostly of non-specialist teachers, it was clear I needed to be the one steering the change. To do this successfully, I realised I’d need to look for examples and case studies outside of our school, to explore exactly what strategies, resources and programming languages other teachers were using. However, I drew a blank. I couldn’t find any local schools teaching computer science. It was both daunting and disheartening not knowing anyone else I could refer to for advice and experience.
“Hello World helps me keep up with the current trends in our thriving computing community.” – Matt Moore
Thankfully, ten years later, the situation has significantly improved. Even with increased research and resources, though, there can still be the sense of feeling alone. With scarce prospects to meet other computing teachers, there’s fewer people to be inspired by, to bounce ideas off, to celebrate achievement, or share the challenges of teaching computing with. Some teachers habitually engage with online discussion forums and social media platforms to plug this gap, but these have their own drawbacks.
It’s great news then that there’s another resource that teachers can turn to. You all know by now that Hello World magazine offers another helping hand for computing teachers searching for richer experiences for their students and opportunities to hone their professional practice. In this Insider’s Guide, I offer practical suggestions for how you can use Hello World to its full potential.
Put an article into practice
Teachers have often told me that strategies like PRIMM and pair programming have had a positive impact on their teaching, after first reading about them in Hello World. Over the five years of its publication, there’s likely to have been an article or research piece that particularly struck a chord with you — so why not try putting the learnings from that article into practice?
“Hello World gives me loads of ideas that I’m excited to try out in my own classroom.” – Steve Rich
You may choose to go this route on your own, but you could persuade colleagues to join you. Not only is there safety in numbers, but the shared rewards and motivation that come from teamwork. Start by choosing an article. This could be an approach that made an impression on you, or something related to a particular theme or topic that you and your colleagues have been seeking to address. You could then test out some of the author’s suggestions in the article; if they represent something very different from your usual approach, then why not try them first with a teaching group that is more open to trying new things? For reflection and analysis, consider conducting some pupil voice interviews with your classes to see what their opinions are of the activity, or spend some time reflecting on the activity with your colleagues. Finally, you could make contact with the author to compare your experiences, seek further support, or ask questions.
Strike up a conversation
Authors generally welcome correspondence from readers, even those that don’t agree with their opinions! While it’s difficult to predict exactly what the outcome may be, it could lead to a productive professional correspondence. Here are some suggestions:
Establish the best way to contact the author. Some have contact details or clues about where to find them in their articles. If not, you might try connecting with them on LinkedIn, or social media. Don’t be disappointed if they don’t respond promptly; I’ve often received replies many months after sending.
Open your message with an introduction to yourself moving onto some positive praise, describing your appreciation for the article and points that resonated deeply with you.
If you have already tried some of the author’s suggestions, you could share your experiences and pupil outcomes, where appropriate, with them.
“One of the things I love about Hello World is the huge number of interesting articles that represent a wide range of voices and experiences in computing education.” – Catherine Elliott
Try to maintain a constructive tone. Even if you disagree with the piece, the author will be more receptive to a supportive tone than criticism. If the article topic is a ‘work in progress’, the author may welcome your suggestions.
Enquire as to whether the author has changed their practice since writing the article or if their thinking has developed.
You might take the opportunity to direct questions at the author asking for further examples, clarity or advice.
If the author has given you an idea for an article, project, or research on a similar theme, they’re likely to be interested in hearing more. Describe your proposal in a single sentence summary and see if they’d be interested in reading an early draft or collaborating with you.
Start a reading group
Take inspiration from book clubs, but rather than discuss works of fiction, instead invite members of your professional groups or curriculum teams to discuss content from issues of Hello World. This could become a regular feature of your meetings where attendees can be invited to contribute their own opinions. To achieve this, firstly identify a group that you’re a part of where this is most likely to be received well. This may be with your colleagues, or fellow computing teachers you’ve met at conferences or training days. To begin, you might prescribe one specific single article or broaden it to include a whole issue. It makes sense to select an article likely to be popular with your group, or one that addresses a current or future area of concern.
“I love Hello World! I encourage my teaching students to sign up, and give out copies when I can. I refer to articles in my lectures.” – Fiona Baxter
To familiarise attendees with the content, share a link to the issue for them to read in advance of the meeting. If you’re reviewing a whole issue, suggest pages likely to be most relevant. If you’re reviewing a single article, make it clear whether you are referring to the page numbers as printed or those in the PDF. You could make it easier by removing all other pages from the PDF and sending it as an attachment. Remember that you can download back issues of Hello World as PDFs, which you can then edit or print.
Encourage your attendees to share the aspects of the article that appealed to them, or areas they could not agree with the author or struggled to see working in their particular setting. Invite any points of issue for further discussion and explanation — somebody in the group might volunteer to strike up a conversation with the author by passing on the feedback from the group. Alternatively, you could invite the author of the piece to join your meeting via video conference to address questions and promote discussion of the themes. This could lead to developing a productive friendship or professional association with the author.
Propose an article
“I wish!” is a typical response I hear when I suggest to a teacher that they should seriously consider writing an article for Hello World. I often get the responses, “I don’t have enough time”, “Nobody would read anything I write”, or, “I don’t do anything worth writing about”. The most common concern I hear, though, is, “But I’m not a writer!”. So you’re not the only one thinking that!
“We strongly encourage first-time writers. My job is to edit your work and worry about grammar and punctuation — so don’t worry if this isn’t your strength! Remember that as an educator, you’re writing all the time. Lesson plans, end-of-term reports, assessment feedback…you’re more of a writer than you think! If you’re not sure where to start, you could write a lesson plan, or contribute to our ‘Me and my Classroom’ feature.”
— Gemma Coleman, Editor of Hello World
Help and support is available from the editorial team. I for one have found this to be extremely beneficial, especially as I really don’t rate my own writing skills! Don’t forget, you’re writing about your own practice, something that you’ve done in your career — so you’ll be an expert on you. Each article starts with a proposal, the editor replies with some suggestions, then a draft follows and some more refinements. I ask friends and colleagues to review parts of what I’ve written to help me and I even ask non-teaching members of my family for their opinions.
Writing an article for Hello World can really help boost your own professional development and career prospects. Writing about your own practice requires humility, analytical thinking and self reflection. To ensure you have time to write an article, make it fit in with something of interest to you. This could be an objective from your own performance management or appraisal. This reduces the need for additional work and adds a level of credibility.
“Professionally, writing for Hello World provides recognition that you know what you’re talking about and that you share your knowledge in a number of different ways.” – Neil Rickus
If that isn’t enough to persuade you, for contributors based outside of the UK (who usually aren’t eligible for free print copies), Hello World will send you a complimentary print copy of the magazine that you feature in to say thank you. Picture the next Hello World issue arriving featuring an article written by you. How does this make you feel? Be honest — your heart flutters as you tear off the wrapper to go straight to your article. You’ll be impressed to see how much smarter it looks in print than the draft you did in Microsoft Word. You’ll then want to show others, because you’ll be proud of your work. It generates a tremendous sense of pride and achievement in seeing your own work published in a professional capacity.
Hello World offers busy teachers a fantastic, free and accessible resource of shared knowledge, experience and inspiring ideas. When we feel most exhausted and lacking inspiration, we should treasure those mindful moments where we can sit down with a cup of tea and make the most of this wonderful publication created especially for us.
Celebrate 5 years of Hello World with us
We marked Hello World’s fifth anniversary with a recent Twitter Spaces event with Alan and Catherine Elliot as our guests. You can catch up with the event recording on the Hello World podcast. And the newest Hello World issue, with a focus on cybersecurity, is available as a free PDF download — dive it today.
How have you been using Hello World in your practice in the past five years? What do you hope to see in the magazine in the next five? Let us know on Twitter by tagging @HelloWorld_Edu.
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