Video English school system, Computing in NC, Computing topics in KS 3, Widening participation agenda

0:00 Intro

0:03 okay after this introduction um last week overview of of the module and and general um organizational things uh today i want to talk about this uh the legal framework that we're operating in and in particular the the national curriculum as this describes roughly what um what schools should teach what teachers should teach and as you'll see there's a few things around that that also have an influence on how schools teach and how you as maybe prospective teachers would teach but they also have an influence on on our activities as a university for outreach

0:46 there's a few things to cover it's it's not a ton of things but still i decided i wanted to say more about about diversity inclusion and how that in particular in computer science becomes relevant but i found i can't really do this justice at the end of this session so maybe we'll come back to that and here i'll just pick out one one aspect of that but other than that we'll go top down we'll look a bit at the school system in the uk for most of you this will be fine and you know this but i want to just wrap up the main points and maybe some things have changed since since you left school uh for example the gcse marks and then we'll look specifically at computer science and then within computer science at key stage three because that's the target group for us

0:49 Outline

1:44 Progression in State-Funded Schools

1:46 okay uh i will probably keep saying the uk education system because that's for short but i should really say the english one because uh what i'll say will be true for england and to some degree for wales but to a lesser degree for scotland northern ireland but yeah let's go by the majority of people

2:06 so here's here's a big overview you start school roughly at age four the school year you turn five you start the compulsory education stage many kids go to some preschool before that but that is voluntarily then you start in in reception class and you spend this year and six more in your primary school and well this is uh key stage zero i think is um it's not an official thing but it would be a key stage zero if there was one the national curriculum really starts with key stage one the first two years and then key stage two and it goes up to key stage four the end of secondary school um for a levels there are some documents as well describing what should be taught but i understand they're not as as strict or schools have somewhat more flexibility on those

3:08 uh the other big thing um there are more or less important exams at the end of the school forms um the sats at the end of primary school but more importantly the gcses at the end of secondary school and of course a levels if you continue into sixth form

3:27 what else should i say this is the usual way of state-funded schools in england there are many many exceptions private schools often have slightly different boundaries some schools move the year nine into key stage four so they start a bit earlier and that also means that in some schools you have to decide your gcse subjects already for year 9 so in year 8. you hardly see this little cursor right

4:09 i think that's that's all i want to say about this so usually your a level marks determine what university you can go to your gcse marks might determine which a-levels you can take but this is this is probably all something that's that's closer to you still and so you will remember this uh one remark at this point is if you're in key stage three you might not think about what university course you might eventually want to take or whether you go to university at all that's still for far down the line that's just something to keep in mind um when we design activities this is still um far on the horizon

4:50 GCSES

4:55 okay um i want to say a few more things about the gcses so we've seen there at the end of year 11. they used to have these grades that go up to a star but this is the thing i don't know if you know this it's been changed again so now we have numbers then the highest is 9 which is essentially like a star but they try to make it a little stricter so leave more gap at the at the top of the range and this this plot is intended to show you why why this is what you want um you see the the top marks are at the bottom and you see this this graph is essentially drifting up that's what people call great inflation in general there's more people getting the higher marks and one solution for this is once in a while you just start a new a new grade that's better than all the previous ones that's what happened with a star and in a sense the nine is a little bit like that another attempt to um work against this this shift upwards yep

6:04 uh yeah so the question was if there isn't a shift downwards from 2010 and that's true um there were some reforms around that time uh they were slightly later i don't know if this can explain this um i would say it's roughly straight but for yeah for the green one for bees there was a slight slight downdrift if you zoom in enough you're right yeah that's interesting one could uh try to find out what happened 2011. um maybe people were concerned and tried to be be stricter in the marking yeah as uh it's not clear it's kept fairly stable after that but i think the the desire to distinguish a bit further was still there

6:53 okay i've heard people typically take nine subjects for gcses but this is just a number i've taken from the web i don't know uh the the span seems to be much bigger some go crazy and others take much fewer and for many jobs you need something like five good passes uh but probably for universities you want to go better than that but

7:20 so far so good any any comments on gcses um yeah i think for next slide this is a bit about the subjects you have a lot of choice but some things are predescribed as i said before most schools choose during their year 9 what they take for gcse so that they can start these in in year 10 and 11 and some schools do it a year early you will always have to take maths english and science in some form but you have some choice of how science looks like in detail and then a typical mix is take some of the other subjects a combination of these and in particular you can take a technical subject this is where computer science fits in and then you make your mix from that so um computer science is a is a core subject which means you have to take it till the end of your secondary school time till the end of key stage four but you don't have to take it as a gcse subject all right so you will still have a class on computing but i guess the motivation for these subjects where you don't take the gcses is slightly different than for those where you have this high stakes exam at the end so um

8:46 even though you have this this continuation of of computing of computing i would imagine it makes a big difference from the mindset whether or not you take it for gcses or not and there are also additional lessons as far as i know i'd like you to jump over to slido now um

9:08 we'll come back to the survey for the pre-session activity but i don't know if you've looked this up or not let's have a guess how many students take computing as gcse subject

9:28 it's the same as last time so if you go sli dot do slash comp three three five and of course you don't want to google this now don't spoil the fun eight pound

9:54 all right um is everyone happy with their with their number there's one shortcoming of slider it doesn't have a question type number so it doesn't show averages or something this is just text but if i would have to say the average from this

10:25 GCSE subject choice

10:39 the answer you have to dig out from this graph i didn't put the percentage there and i put in lots of other subjects so let's try to decipher this a bit first of all i put in maps because it's compulsory this should be the number of students really taking it i don't know what happened in this year there's something something weird going on uh because there's not a dip in all the other subjects so i don't know maybe we have to ignore 2013

11:11 something like this and then the subjects are sorted as uh they are in numbers this year and you can see computer science here is this little triangle um i think it was roughly ten percent it was something like um 77 000 exams in computing out of uh maybe maybe half a million in total something something like this a bit more uh well obviously substantially more seven hundred seven hundred thousand according to that yeah i suppose it's not for instance that my id has gone down uh that's not a coincidence because it doesn't exist anymore past this stage so in a sense in in 2014 it was decided to be phased out and be replaced by computing but there was some time like you can't say next year teachers please start teaching this new subject from now uh and also like there's classes who already started of course so there was some time where for um for some time the the two subjects existed uh next to each other and this is obviously computing had to be rolled out in the school so we have to ignore the first parts and essentially you can ignore it but i still wanted to put it there because it shows it used to be at much higher levels than

12:37 computing is now and allegedly the perception is that computing is harder than it was so fewer take it of course that's it's an understandable reason but it's also very unfortunate and i also like that computing is the relevance of computing in a sense is between learning german and spanish so spanish is more important german's less important i kind of get that there's many people speaking spanish no doubt but there's a lot of more people using computers so maybe we want to change that number a bit it's also um you should compare it to the sciences the traditional sciences um i mean they're basically all on the same level which is probably because you can't separately just pick and choose so this uh red green this is biology chemistry and physics is just on top of each other and that's easily twice as much as computing okay so just for context if we like this or whatever that means but that's the fact

13:57 okay we've seen a little bit what the system generally is now let's let's look a little bit closer at what teaching computing means and what's behind this term in school

14:10 Pre-Session Task

14:12 and for that let's start with the pre-session task that you filled out i wonder if i can show the results i probably have to switch here the definition of computer science this was basically just reading from the slides but just to recap uh simon peyton jones defined computer science as the study of information computation and communication in natural and artificial systems

14:44 i think it's it's interesting that he puts information first and tries to explain that first as well because if you if you think about computer science probably computation or even the devices are more in foreground but he puts information first

15:02 many good reasons for teaching computing i think he lists mainly too give people gift students the ability to understand what's happening around them and if the world around them uses computers they probably should understand something about them and the second reason is jobs find find a job after they leave school

15:30 okay um how many myths that depends a bit where you stopped the talk as well there's more myths coming up i think it was three according to that bar and okay this is the interesting part um

15:45 i don't know do you do you feel like explaining your answer a bit now just to the group or shall we leave it with that we can come back to all these examples for our lessons because i think these are these are good examples to base a lesson around

16:03 so we can also just just keep them for the record so finite statement machines some abstraction that doesn't really relate to technology directly but this is used in lots of technology indirectly especially if you use regular expressions right

16:26 and sorting algorithms as we've seen the example in the talk um yeah that was that was the the prime example that he showed and yeah the the traveling traveling salesperson problem um i mean specifically he's talking about abstract algorithms and about the the complexity theory behind it so this is one thing that's special in computer science that i always like to point this out in comparison to engineering disciplines computer science has this feature that we can prove lower bounds we have abstract models of what happens in reality now physics physicists have that too where engineers have that too but usually their models are either so complicated so detailed that they can't really prove anything mathematically about them or they're abstracting quite a bit from reality and then it um you can you can show something in them like um my example always this preservation of energy is a lower bound from physics you cannot build an engine a machine that beats that lower bound in a sense you cannot have higher efficiency than what preservation of energy tells you is possible but also this lower bound is not really interesting you can't even get close to it in computer science we can prove lower bounds in some models that we can achieve or at least achieve up to constant

17:51 factors in the running time things like that and that's that's a big difference so we're um we are lucky that our machines are closer to the abstract models we can study and we have better tools for the abstract models and they are much closer in total

18:12 and complexity theory is one such lower bound technique you can show that no algorithm well at least very unlikely no algorithm solves this problem in polynomial time and for the traveling sales first problem that means if you have a few thousand cities you won't be solving this in your life span if you use an exact algorithm a brute force method

18:38 cybersecurity yeah and the sorting algorithms again all right anything you want to add i wanted to point out a few terms that are a bit confusing easy to mix up and i think also are not universally agreed upon whether you use them exactly in this way or or in a slightly different meaning but i would least i would at least for for this module want to fix them and this is following uh like they're used in the talk and like they're used in um in this there's a pdf available online uh it's linked later it's called the computing at school guide or well there's one for primary and one for secondary education so computing is the entire subject and that comprises different things it's what's mentioned in the national curriculum as the subject name the official title and it can in a sense be said to comprise of these two things three things computer science information technology and digital literacy

18:50 Computing vs. Computer Science vs. ICT/IT vs. Coding vs...

19:51 um i think these three fields they come up in the talk but not as prominently um they're explained in more detail in this guide so i took the the following definitions from there as well computer science is similar to the definition from simon it's the scientific and practical study of computation so here the focus is on computation i think the information can be counted towards that as well and communication a little bit as long as it's not the technical side so this is in a sense the the theoretical part

20:33 whereas information technology is how computers and the equipment around that work so in a sense it's the hardware side but it's also the part of building creative projects with computing methods or using them in some in some specific way um and they count way to store data etc also as part of information technology this i think these two are somewhat overlappings at some points like data structures are also about how to store certain data but they're also theoretical algorithms and the last is a bit more separate that's digital literacy

21:21 i'm looking for this is there's a synonym that i wanted to put on the slide it's it's described here as essentially using technology in a responsible way that's it's separate from computer science in a sense maybe you can do maybe you can teach digital literacy without learning about computer science but it's probably a bad idea to teach computer science without talking about digital literacy but this is more interdisciplinary it's not restricted to computer science you can also talk about the uh the ethics or the implications of technology in other subjects but it's counted as part of computing in this framework all right

22:09 i wanted to ask you about your school experience so again on slider i put some more distinctions in than just these in particular the ones that um [Music] very very far back um were often used uh there was a time when when teaching computer science in school was synonymous with using microsoft office

22:45 these times are passed i hope but i wanted to put that separate and of course i'd be interested to hear what the more is uh slider doesn't have a text field where you can put this on top of this but maybe you can just tell me so it's good that you learned about this digital tools are useful um and information technology i mean in the sense it was defined on the slide is also useful but only some of you did programming in school right did the others have some computing subjects i guess you had or no okay so those that did programming also did algorithms i guess i don't know uh it's just the same number no in total but

24:11 yeah i guess the the ethics and implications that's often something that that teachers like to cover also from other subjects so it's it's something that's easy to cover even if you don't have specific computing courses and yeah digital literacy and ethics is kind of related um

24:28 it's often often discussed together with someone does the the number one here want to tell what more was so i'm not sure if it's including any of the other categories

24:44 okay uh yeah if it's if it's specific networking hardware maybe this is this is a bit beyond i would say information technology is is the right category but uh they might go a bit further than that um i mean we definitely didn't talk in school about how switches and routers work

25:09 yeah that's cool so you see there's there's quite some variety and [Music] only half of the class basically went through the curriculum as it's now described or prescribed um and i think if you just start counting 2014 was it officially introduced but then it took a few years before it really started even if it had started right the first day we still don't have the students coming out of this entering universities so we don't know is all still an open experiment how effective this will have been in the end one good outcome would be that we get students coming out of out of schools in universities that are well equipped for studying computer science and maybe we get more students who want to do computer science but we don't know yet it's it's kind of not clear how well it will will have worked still uh second future all right um

26:10 The National Curriculum in Computing

26:13 and this is this is actually it that is the national curriculum in computing i wanted to put this on the slide just to make the point that it fits on the slide and you can probably just see the headlines should be readable for you this is not just one key stage is all all of computing that you have up to a levels um and there's even some like um um my point is it's not a lot it's very condensed okay who has had a look at this before at one of the national curriculum documents ever uh i mean they're mostly for teachers why would you um but yeah if you're thinking about becoming a teacher maybe uh it's worth having a look uh i don't know we can zoom in a bit

27:11 i think the ames the overall aims is something that simon mentioned in his talk that he's fairly proud of the formulation here apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science and he lists specifically abstraction logic algorithms data representation and some of the other points and then this is a bit spelled out and detailed for the different key stages it's similar topics that come up several times but of course they get substantially more technical and deeper the further you go and you see the biggest part actually is about key stage three um i don't want to discuss this in much detail because we'll um we'll talk about it from the perspective of the of the other document it's also very very condensed so it's even even for computer scientists i think sometimes not 100 clear what is what is meant

28:08 um but we you can pick out some examples like key stage 3 you're talking about boolean logic and something in circuits in programming and how numbers can be represented in binary so this it goes hand in hand with why do we do boolean logic well we want to teach how computers can compute how do they compute with numbers well they fiddle around with the binary representation so that's that's one of the topics and we'll see some some of the others in more detail later okay

28:48 so um feel free to look at this in more in more detail but you will see it's quite abstract there's quite a way to go from reading this document and designing your lesson when you step into class uh year nine or eight and decide what you're gonna do today

29:08 and so another another thing that's fairly interesting and not so typical i guess there was a grassroots the computing at school mostly and other organizations were involved in drafting a curriculum for the teachers that they can roll out but there's no official one there's just several ones that are suggestions and they follow the national curriculum but they do the details in different ways i think there's mainly two now this first one is very new it's i think it was just finished last year or something uh so that's that's done together with the the raspberry pi foundation they made a new attempt of spelling out all the lessons for all all of the curriculum and there's um an older one which is not quite as detailed from computing at school that's the the other link that's what we'll base the topic list on but yeah they're similar and here's a a nice graphic where you see how all the topics listed but again very condensed um not for now i think we spent too much time on rebooting laptops so let me

30:26 move on to key stage three so maybe you have a slightly better understanding what computing in school now looks like we have these three big areas computer science information technology digital literacy and then orthogonal to that lots of topics at different levels of detail in the different key stages

30:48 i've said this before key stage 3 is particularly important for us as an outreach target because it's where the gcse subjects are chosen so that sets the sets the route for the for the future of kits but also it's where the first time they do real programming in the sense of not clicking things together in scratch but writing programs in a textual programming language and they go go to some some depth with that so in in principle um going by the curriculum if we invite uh year eight or year nine to campus you can rely on them having seen some python programming and they are in principle um able to do that uh how much of that has stuck with each individual kit will be a different story

31:45 Computing Topics in KS3

31:48 um here are the topics that are done in key stage three and again so we there's some programming usually in python even though that's not compulsory they do quite some uh data structures the the basic things that you can use in python i don't think dictionaries are covered but okay that's details um they usually know about searching binary search and some simple sorting algorithms they will have seen boolean logic or we'll see it over the course of key stage three and they will talk a bit about hardware so it's it's a fairly broad cut through computer science you could say it's even a small part of computer science degrees but of course not always going um as deep as you would at uni

32:40 so these are the topics that you can tie your lesson onto into it's good if you pick something from that list but then take it into a slightly different direction than what kids would have seen in school so my

32:56 i don't know why that happened uh one reason why i'm uh showing you all these material for teachers is so that you can look into the curricula and see what usually the schools already do so that you don't duplicate that in your lesson but you can still tie into that so that what you do on top of that has some connection to what the kids already know and have seen

33:36 Further Resources for KS3

33:37 i see so yeah the two curricular you're referring to i guess are these that i've shown before this is the same links just the the key stage three part um yeah the question was can we rely on them having done either of those i guess the answer is no you cannot rely on it really because the national curriculum is compulsory for the state funded schools but the actual implementation is up to the teachers and in particular this one the teach computing curriculum is fairly new so this might not be as widespread yet this one i would bet many teachers kind of take inspiration from that because why would you reinvent the wheel but they might have chosen to go some slightly different route i think also um this is key stage three is is these three years so in what order you do which of the topics i think it's not prescribed so that's that's another challenge we don't pick kids at the end of key stage three but somehow towards the end but in the middle of the last year so they will some of the things will not have been covered yet yeah that's that's a bit of a challenge you can't really rely on much yeah

34:49 okay another resource i want to point out uh because it's useful for you to get a quick overview what they might have seen is this this part of bbc bite size it's intended as revision for students before they take their exams but it's also just a nice list of topics condensed to little questions and yeah here's the link for key stage three in computing

35:16 okay so this is a bit of a dry lesson today because there's all this background that i think i want to give want to get you get to you but none of it is directly leading into your assessments it's just all hovering in the background one last thing from this from this list is widening participation who has heard the term before apart from me

35:42 okay good um i'd like to have this term understood in a slightly broader sense um in the university context it is usually understood as uh widening participation postcodes i'll come to that in a second uh the big idea is to get students from misrepresented less represented backgrounds into universities try to do as much as you can to encourage that it's a key area for the russell group and probably most universities and the taster days are officially also part of that initiative on the department level we have a uni-white team specifically separate from the departments or orthogonal to that structure who is specifically doing events for that so here's their website and um where you can you can read their aims um

35:45 Widening Participation The university has a commitment to widening participation

36:47 Higher Education Participation rates

36:48 the the specific understanding that whitening participation in this context usually takes is summarized in this picture but i should explain you what that shows the data for this is fairly old i think it's 2013-14 so what's done for this picture is you take a certain area a postcode and you determine how many people are age 18 and how many of those are in higher education or in some form of higher education i don't know the exact cut off what is what is counted and what is not uh universities definitely count it and then you take the percentage how many are in higher education of the age that where they could be in higher education if they went through the standard curriculum and you divide this into quintiles for each postcode so quintile one is that's the lowest 20 of all postcodes the lowest uh percentage that go that continues into higher education and well the next twenty percent and so up and percent quintile five is the largest uh twenty percent of postcode areas so if if you're in the dark areas that just means if you're a random student in that area you're much more likely to be in higher education at the appropriate age does that make sense so this is just data that is easy to get

38:13 because postcodes are exist this doesn't look at any other kind of criteria so that's uh the sense in which wide red whitening participation is a bit restricted in well often of the term is a bit restricted to this specific sense socio-economic background is usually correlated with postcode and so you get the influence of socioeconomic background of course there's more what's quite obvious from this picture is liverpool the whole area same on the other side of the mercy in birkenhead is mostly quintile one and two so there's fairly low participation rates in higher education despite lots of universities or higher education providers in the area and so you will see this in the schools that we invite there's a loot a huge variety in diversity some of the kids will have fixed plans of going to this and that university and others will not really have considered the thought at all so that's that's the challenge we want to present university as an achievable goal for them but without without lying to them they will need certain marks to get into their programs etc so you will want to to be honest without being elitist sounds great is easier said than done

39:40 on the positive side you have a great opportunity because you can really make a big impact if someone hasn't really thought about university at all before and you can convince them this is a possibility that can have a huge impact on their lives

39:55 Implications for your lesson plan

39:58 and so just some some parting thoughts from this session um the purpose of the taster days is on on the one side a bit to support the teachers but that support is less and less needed because more and more high quality material is available for them to design lessons and the second is is from this whitening participation agenda we want to show that university life is not this elitist thing where everyone walks around with uh funny wardrobes with funny funny garments but our student body is already diverse and open and we want to continue doing that keeping it open widening it further

40:43 yeah i've said that you will have to be prepared to have a wide range in the students so you will want some lessons that can be can cater for that

40:56 without dumping computer science down i think we don't do anyone a favor with but the so the the solutions to that in the abstract sense are you want lessons that students can relate to so you want to introduce something abstract by starting with something concrete with an example ideally from their experience and environment something they already know and then take it from there relevant goes further it also means that the thing you teach makes a difference it makes a difference for the students to know what you what you're teaching them that can be understanding the world better or building something or many other things but you will have to explicitly make that point uh it's often an assumption you do something and they will just see or realize that this is great it's better to make that explicit and the last point tying again to the diversity of of the classes we invite you want something achievable so you want to deliver some success in the activities and tasks that you do so you want to make something that there is guaranteed success but also success on different levels to keep those challenged that are already further in their learning

42:18 i think that's all i want to say for this uh for now this sounds like it's uh a bolt a bolt tough call and we'll look at how to do that a bit more in the next lessons next two there's some scaffolding available for doing that and lots of creativity uh opportunities for creativity from your side to make that happen