Coding across the school at Chisholm - Part 1

Chisholm Catholic Primary School Teacher Librarian Fiona Lark has been introducing coding to all year groups across the school in Term 1 of 2018.  The aim being to focus on developing familiarity and fluency with computational thinking practices.

The approach was to provide a narrative based coding design to develop computational thinking where students are designing, coding, iterating and debugging. This approach provides students with more opportunities to really learn about coding and makes it more student-centric and relatable.

The Learning Action Plan across all grades was:
To plan, program and introduce a progression of basic coding activities from K-6, integrated across other KLAs.

Success criteria across all grades:

• Students will work together to solve problems
• Students will construct a basic narrative using control technologies
• Students can create simple algorithms for others to solve
• Teacher will have developed a coding strategy to build coding skills across the school

To achieve this it was decided to use Blue-Bots as the robotic tool to introduce coding from K-6.  It provided a continuum for the teacher to program across all stages.

Students would have a session each week on coding.

See the program docs:

Years 1-2

Years 3-4

Years 5-6

Differentiation across the grades:

• K - Focused on  basic navigation and coding concepts using the Blue-bots with pre-made mats
• Stage 1 - Focused on creating their own coding program based on well known stories - The Very Hungry Caterpillar or We're Going on a Bear hunt or Rosie's Walk (used purpose made cards for the story)
• Stage 2-3 Focused on creating a program to represent a narrative they created.

Individual learning intentions and success criteria were co-constructed with each stage.

Parents involvement

Resources used across all grades
Created plastic 4x4 grid mats

Templates for their story and coding

Story cards from The Learning Exchange - Bear walk , Rosies Walk and The Hungry Caterpillar
Blue-bots (18)

Part 2 coming soon