Hullavington CE Primary and Nursery School

Computing at Hullavington

Computing at Hullavington is a rich and lively subject- we pride ourselves on the level of technology we provide to our learners.

Curriculum Intent:

We use the National Curriculum as the starting point for teaching in the school. The intentions of our curriculum are to:

• Equip learners with a deep understanding of fundamental digital literacy that they can apply in using a range of applications. 
• Give children the skills needed to use ICT to help them in their lives, e.g. by searching the internet, taking and editing photographs or using more specialised equipment like data-loggers.
• Prepare children for the future by giving them a deep understanding of internet and computer safety, especially through use of our own in-school social media platform.
• Enable learners to access coding in a fun and engaging way, learning coding languages through the use of advanced robots.

In general we aim to give children unforgetable experiences through their computing learning. Hullavington pupils have access to a wide range of exciting equipment, from robots to a 3D printer.

We break learning down into three broad strands:

Internet Safety and digital citizenship:

ICT plays an increasingly large part in our lives and we aim to equip children for an online future. A term out of each year is spent teaching children how to stay safe online, with learners progressing from basics such as polite use of social media through to more advanced ideas like picking a safe password.

Our leaners make use of DB Primary, which is a closed social media platform only accessible to those in the school. Through this, children learn how to send email, create a blog and chat with one another online. Through this they learn the value of polite communication as well as the skill of managing their own login details and so on.

Digital literacy and design:

Preparing children for the future means giving them lots of experience in core ICT skills. In early years in school this covers basic skills- holding and using a mouse, turning devices on etc. Higher up in the school skills such as touch typing and photo editing are taught. This is done across a range of different applications and software suites including PurpleMash, 2Simple and the Microsoft Office suite. We also aim to excite and inspire children with digital design, with, for example, digital art projects or making 3D objects using our 3D Printer.

Computer science:

A big focus of this strand is coding skills which are taught throughout the school from reception up. In the early years, equipment is used such as the Bee Bots, which let pupils experiment with giving instructions and testing the result. At all levels children have access to quite a large set of different robots, including Dash & Dot and OhBots, which give them a range of experiences in coding. Children initially learn largely visual programming languages but this progresses to more advanced instruction sets such as Scratch.

Learners in our nursery using cameras to take photographs.