If you want to confuse a room full of students, start your computing lesson by walking them away from anything that, to them, resembles a computer. They tend to look at you rather oddly. Approriately, it does not compute.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but both inside and outside of schools, computing has become seen as something that happens at a desk on a screen, not in the mind. It is our job to change that.
Computers not only run so many aspects of our lives in various guises - without a desktop computer in sight - but the key facets of computing underpin an approach to learning that is excellent for many non-computational tasks, particularly for problem solving.
So how do you teach computing without a computer? Here are four ideas to get you started, which are proving increasingly popular in many primary classrooms.
1 Become robots
Programming is one of the key elements of the National Curriculum, but rather than sitting students in front of Scratch, you can instead ask them to become a robot. Get children to work in pairs with one taking the role of programmer and the other the role of robot. The “robot” must complete a number of tasks but can only do what the partner “programmer” tells them to do.
So, for example, the task might be that the programmer must get the robot to walk a 2D shape that the robot then has to guess. The programmer uses directional instructions that can be developed during the lesson (so instead of saying “forward five times”, they say “forward five”). As the students get better at the tasks, increase the complexity of the task or the language they have to use (introduce degrees, for example).
Further challenges could include trying to navigate your robot around a designated area without banging into any other robots.
2 Whiteboard algorithms
Having successfully survived the first lesson without injuring one another, the students are now ready to develop some algorithms. They will not be doing this on the latest computing device, but using a simple whiteboard and pen.
A group decides on a start and end point within the school and write down a series of instructions to take a student from one to the other. The student completes these instructions and the group records where they ended up.
Very rarely will the student be where they should be, so directions need to be adapted and retrialled. If the student does reach the right place quickly, you can ask the group to fine-tune the instructions for more accuracy, such as to reach within a one metre circle, for example.
As the group hones their instructions, tinkering and debugging, they realise that they are using terminology and processes used in computer programming.
3 Human cranes
The student’s hand is no longer a hand, but is instead a crane that needs programming. This is the brilliant starting point for an idea from Phil Bagge (you can get hold of it for free here).
Essentially, children must arrange and then follow a series of instruction cards to transfer building blocks between one site and another. To get these blocks in the right place takes some trial and error, or rather fine-tuning of an algorithm using tinkering and debugging.
As each challenge is completed, they move on to the next, more difficult challenge.
4 Playground networks
Phil Bagge - inputting legend that he is - has a second idea I have used with great success: getting students to take on different roles within a network. For the network to work, the children have to arrange themselves in the playground in the correct way. The different components of the network can be explained to the pupils as it is built up.
Once your students have arranged themselves in the manner that they believe is right, you send some “data” (a child) through this “computer” to see if it works and to highlight how it works.
Henry Penfold is a primary school teacher and an ICT lead
