A key type of thinking contained with the Digital Technologies Curriculum is computational thinking. This involves being able to identify the solution to a problem and describe it in a way that a computer would understand.
In Year 1 the Band Description which refers to the computational thinking aspects is:
Students use the concept of abstraction when defining problems, to identify the most important information, such as the significant steps involved in making a sandwich. They begin to develop their design skills by conceptualising algorithms as a sequence of steps for carrying out instructions, such as identifying steps in a process or controlling robotic devices.
In Year 1 this Semester, many aspects of this band description support Location and Direction within Mathematics. There are a number of activities, unplugged and plugged, which support both of these areas of the Curriculum.
Students use a life-sized bee-bot grid to move student bots around to get them from one location to another. This includes having to move around obstacles.
They can then abstract the directions so that they are using simple arrows and mark the sequence of steps out.
They can then test their algorithm out and debug as they go:
Another example of an activity uses actual bee-bots and so is a ‘plugged’ activity. Mrs Fisher used a bee-bot mat that had been made by the students, using images from their Geography unit on managed, man-made and natural environments: