Sequentially, the lessons following on from this all activities focussed on numeracy. Students need to have a key understanding of mathematics in order to incorporate these skills in to the programming activities. REFER TO LITERATURE HERE. WHY DO STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW THIS. There are lots of opportunities in Computer Science when numeracy can be applied. In every activity students conducted, they related to real life examples (Appendix). As can be seen from students work, we started from the foundations of basic addition of two integers then built on this once the foundations where in place. Teaching Standard 4 states that as teachers we need be aware of pupils’ capabilities and their prior knowledge, and plan teaching to build on these (DfE, 2011). The lesson plans support this and it was vital I knew about students capabilities and the series of lessons built on their already existing knowledge. If students lacked in numeracy skills, they would not have been able to progress through the activities as students were required to test the outcomes of each program (student work). If students do not understand basic number systems, BIDMAS and data type’s students would not know if their outcome was correct. To support learning, students had a printed version of the comparison operators that would be used in the activities.

The activities conducted differentiated in difficulty with students progressing at their own rate. Throughout all the lessons there were plenary’s to collaborate learning and discuss key features of Python and their coding.

Assessment took place throughout the series of lessons. This was the first 3 lessons of a series of 8. Students conducted various programming activities after being taught the content. Brown and Knight (1994) stated that assessment is important as it is a performance indicator for both staff and students and provides opportunities to remedy mistakes. High quality verbal feedback was given during every programming activity and this motivated students. Teaching Standard 5 states that we should give pupils regular feedback, both orally and through accurate marking, and encourage pupils to respond to the feedback. (APPENDIX) I used terms such as ‘almost’ and ‘nearly’ during verbal feedback encouraging the correct response from the student, rather than them relying on me giving them the answer; a term Davies (1998) called evaluative listening.

Students began to learn from their mistakes and highlight mistakes in their evaluations. Nightingale et al. (1996) stated that assessment should also focus on team-working, problem solving and communication skills. These skills are transferable skills that can be used in many different subject areas, plus in society. Not only did the discussions during my lesson highlight this but it gave chance for me to