I designed this unit with the aim of introducing young students to the fundamentals of programming, in the hope of helping them to view programming as a discipline built on logic and sequential processing. Theory is kept to a minimum,  with students asked to learn 7 key, interrelated key words. Most of the learning takes place within the Scratch visual programming language environment, and students can be encouraged to work independently, solve their own problems and think creatively. The unit provides three levels of assessment, and I allowed students to decide for themselves which they would tackle, allowing students to differentiate the task for themselves.

• ICT Unit – Y7 – 201011 – Programming 101 – Unit Overview
• ICT Unit – Y7 – 201011 – Programming 101 – Task – 1 Standard
• ICT Unit – Y7 – 201011 – Programming 101 – Task – 2 Challenging
• ICT Unit – Y7 – 201011 – Programming 101 – Task – 3 Ridiculous
• ICT Unit – Y7 – 201011 – Programming 101 – Mark Sheet

On the whole my students seemed to enjoy the challenge, although at times they were very frustrated. I used the following diagram to try to help them understand their feelings, and how they change during the problem solving process:

This unit is my first attempt to introduce students to computer systems in a thorough, formal and organised manner, and it has proved both educational and enjoyable for both myself and (I believe) my students. It uses a very simple layered model (which I call the Four Layer Model) to help students understand how hardware, software, networks and people each function as parts of complex computer systems. For my Year 9 students this was their first opportunity to really work with computer hardware (they had to reassembly old PCs) and software (they had to install Ubuntu Linux). It also gave them new insights into how the Internet works, and finally a glimpse of the complexities involved in human use of technology at the individual and group levels. Hopefully this unit has managed to demystify those little plastic and metal boxes they spend so much time staring at!

If you are planning on running this unit, be prepared to answer lots of interesting questions, and fix lots of problems. Let me know if you need any help. The files below should provide you with all of the information you need:

• Unit Outline
• Presentation 00
• Presentation 01
• Presentation 02
• Presentation 03
• Presentation 04
• Mark Sheet
• Four Layer Model
• Four Layer Model with Annotation
• Rapid Presentation Example
• Example Internet: Role Play – This video was one of the outcomes of the unit. You can read more about it in this blog post.

This unit starts with assumption that students are better at ICT than teachers, and that the teachers at your school need help. Students work individually but collaboratively to learn about various aspects of the Mac (both hardware and software). This information is then used to populate a pre-structured wiki, essentially creating an online manual for others to use. At the end of the unit, students need to work with a partner to line up a two-on-one session where they help a teacher to improve their ICT skills by using the wiki. I recently ran this unit simultaneously with 60 11-12 year old Y7 students, and they adapted to the collaborative nature of the wiki fantastically. At the end of the unit, when they had all taught their teachers, I received excellent feedback on their performance from my colleagues. It also got them really thinking and talking about the computers they use every day, and what they can do with them.

The material below should be all that you need to deliver this unit at your school:

• Unit Outline
• Class Completion Record
• Lesson 01 Presentation
• Teaching Session Feedback
• Student Mark Sheet

The aim of this unit is to equip students in Years 7, 8 and 9 with the skills needed to manage their own learning in an online world, including research, presentation, reflection and communication. The unit centers around student blogs, and the integration of other technologies.Whilst it is an ICT unit, it can easily be adapted to suite a wide range of subjects.

On completion of the project students should each have their own blog, in which they have collected and organised their work as well as a range of resources from around the Web. Ideally, students will have begun to understand what they can do online, and how this is constrained by copyright and educational fair use. Some of the following materials may be useful in the teaching of this unit:

• Learning Online – general overview of the unit.
• Assessment Rubric – a simple rubric to aid teachers and students in assessment.
• Anatomy of a Blog – a visual guide to some key elements of a blog. Based on my demo blog.
• Class Completion Record – a spreadsheet for tracking the progress of a number of classes.
• Student Completion Record – a spreadsheet for use in one-on-one progress checks with students, which ideally will be carried out towards the end of the unit.
• Unit Summary for Students – a summary document providing a recap of everything covered in the unit for students to use in their own time, to supplement their in-class learning.

I have just completed running this with 6 classes across Years 7, 8 and 9, and it has been generally successful. All students now have a blog with some content, and the majority have met most of the criteria. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I ran the unit over 6 weeks, and so some aspects receive less emphasis than they ideally would have. The students generally entered into the spirit of blogging, although some mistakenly linked the online nature of the work to informal writing. This lead to an emphasis being placed on writing in a style appropriate to the intended audience. There were only one or two instances of students writing inappropriately on their blogs, or those of their classmates. These actions generally seemed to be borne of naivety rather than malice. In order to moderate the blogs, I collected all the post and comment RSS feeds into a reader, and I periodically check to see what students have been writing.

Listed below are an exemplary piece of work from each of the year groups who participated in this project:

• Natalie’s School Blog - Year 7
• Lawanya’s Learning Blog - Year 8
• Kevin’s School Blog - Year 9

Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in teaching this unit: I am more than happy to help where I can. If you have taught this unit, I would love to hear how you got on.