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

0:00 <Untitled Chapter 1>

0:03 So, welcome back to Comp 335 Communicating Computer Science. Uh today we want to talk about the the national curriculum in computing just as a little bit of background so that you know uh what children are supposed to learn in school.

0:23 I wanted to say a few words about the education system. Now, many of you went to school here so that you know more about this than I do probably, but uh some of you are from abroad like me and so look at that briefly and then um what happened to computer science in in that context. I'm going to look a bit more in detail at Key Stage 3. So, well, we'll cover that. That's uh years 7, 8, and 9 usually. Um because that's the target age group for our taster days. Uh and I'll talk a bit about widening participation.

0:58 Progression in State-Funded Schools

1:02 Uh I tried to make one one table that gives the the key uh division of of years into school types. Now, when it comes to the UK, the school system is is complicated and fractured. Uh not all schools follow this. Um there are private schools that don't follow the national curriculum at all even though not many. Uh usually those are the ones that do much more or they're on the esoteric end of the spectrum and do uh do things quite differently. But, the ma- vast majority of schools and state schools seem to seem to follow roughly this uh division. So, there's 6 years of of primary school starting with year zero if you want, reception class which is a transition from from early childhood education to school. Uh playful but a little bit of learning. Um and then uh the old school system was to have um a big central test at the end of primary school and then that decides if you go to a a selective grammar school or a comprehensive school.

2:06 Now, most places have abolished that system also because this test seems to have been quite stressful for kids. But there's some exceptions. Some counties still have it. The Wirral is one of one of those. Um which is just next to Liverpool. Uh then secondary schools irrespective of whether that's grammar or comprehensive or whatever other school form uh covers the next 5 years and ends with the biggest exam probably for most the GCSEs. And that's also the end of the compulsory school uh education that you have to go through under normal circumstances. And then you can continue with A levels in the sixth form or or college. Uh these often are combined with the secondary schools so they can be in the same building etc. same institution but formally they are they are separate.

3:06 Any questions or comments amendments so far? That's just the the rough big picture. Um Uh-huh. So you're saying it's like an assessment center kind of test for job interviews the 11 plus.

3:43 Yeah, I think there's a reason why many places don't do it anymore. Now, my my son's in year four on the Wirral so he'll if and he eyed some grammar schools so maybe he'll have have to go through it then. Uh okay, so this I mean this is um mostly relevant for us because we're looking at secondary schools uh as our as our main target. Uh but just for background. Um some some bits about GCSEs as well because uh what I probably uh well become uh it's it's on this one. So, GCSEs is uh a certain standard of um of an exam in in certain subjects, but you can choose which ones you take. And so, the exams are always at the end of year year 11. Um but you can choose which subjects you take, and you can even do more or less. And well, I think five good passes, that's the bare minimum for most employers. You'll probably want more, but uh and this this plot shows a bit um what people call grade inflation.

4:52 So, you see that the top marks um over time made up uh a bigger and bigger fraction, at least in the long run. How uh if you go just back a few years, it seems more stable. Uh but still 2019, people switched from these letter marks to now uh numerical marks, and the nine should be regarded as above the old A star. So, I don't know, this this might be after you you've done it, hopefully. So, uh I don't know how how well known this is. Um so, the the mark system has changed a bit there.

5:33 I think to tackle grade inflation, so it it was people found it was silly to say, "Okay, let's uh let's try to just push back on on the letter system to have fewer A stars." That seemed hard to sell. So, instead, they just added another grade on top. Uh you know, Yeah, so people are probably just converting them still uh because it's that's what what you're used to. That's why you still measure your weight in stone. Come on, guys.

6:19 Okay. I'm not sure, sorry. This is probably what I what I read uh on some website, uh hopefully the government one. Right. So, you're saying basically the four should be below here.

6:58 I'll check. The The thing is, why would you have so many levels of failing, right? Either it's fail or not fail. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah, in a way we have to say that you need two, right? There's There's not just below 40.

7:33 Okay, I'll I'll I'll look up um where I got this. Um Uh in terms of the subject choice, this seems to be a hard one as well. There's a ton of subjects. Not all schools offers not all schools offer everything. Not even the length of of Key Stage 4 that leads to GCSE this is the same. Some schools went to 3 years. Say they give kids more time to prepare for the exams. Then a few schools few teachers I talked to say oh no they went back to 2 years because they felt the kids need more time to choose. So it seems um like we'll have to live with the situation that you either have 9 and 10 at 10 and 11 or 9, 10 and 11. And so the choice for the subjects can be in year 8 or year 9 and there might be even exceptions to that rule. What subjects do you take? So there's a few that you have to do. You have to do something of you have to do math and English and you have to do some science.

7:38 GCSE subject choice

8:37 Which could either be the smaller version called combined science in my understanding or you usually do triple science the three subjects um as individual GCSEs. And then usually you're forced to do somethings in addition where you have a lot more options. And computer science counts as one technical subject where you can replace it with something else. And you have to pick usually one of the other categories as well. My understanding is you can take as many as you want as long as your schedule allows it and you're not going completely crazy. But I don't know how how realistic that really is.

9:21 But the point is computer science is an option there for GCSEs but it's one among many other things and so unlike the sciences where most kids that have some interest in in STEM science, technology, engineering, mathematics they often go for triple science without much second thought. Uh for computer science, I think that's that's not necessarily true. That's my my impression.

9:50 And so, here's the consequence of that. Uh Now, this is a this is a bit hard to read. I don't know. So, you see maths uh is basically the number of students because everyone has to take it. So, that shows you how many students in each year group you have. A little short of a million. Uh and then for the other subjects, they're electives. These are further down. So, uh even physics, etc., the the triple science individual subjects are here. Now, if what I said was true, right? We should have biology, chemistry, physics basically as the same same line. I can't see chemistry really. I think it's behind the green one. So, that would support my hypothesis that if people take uh split the sciences, they take all three. Um Yeah, and then uh computing is is down here. You should ignore the first bit because there was a time when we had IT and computing both offered.

10:43 Um or I ICT. Uh and that was somewhat popular. way above the level that computing now is. Or computer science, I should say. Uh and now we can discuss that a bit. So, one thing that's confusing is there is a a core subject computing that everyone now has to take throughout Key Stage 4. So, till the end of year 11 when you do GCSEs. However, that's not the same as choosing the computer science GCSE. So, there's a little bit of uh base level computing that everyone does. Um and we'll we'll come to what that covers. Uh my Yeah, well, um we'll cover what the curriculum says. Uh what arrives at the students is not always the same. And the computer science GCSE courses go quite a bit deeper than that. So, I think the difference between the two is substantial.

11:44 Uh yeah, so why why that dip from Uh you could argue whether ICT and computing should both further be up here or at least at the level of the sciences. Uh but why was there this dip down from uh ICT down to computer science? Uh allegedly ICT was a relatively simple subject or perceived as a simple subject. And computer science is perceived as a harder subject to get good marks in GCSEs. And that's at least one possible explanation. It's not so clear if that's all, right? Another issue is a new subject, so schools only started offering it, so that's probably the uh initial slope. Uh by now, this should not such not be such of a problem.

12:40 So, let's uh try to zoom in a bit what computer science really means here. So, uh I mean, you have a grasp of the of the field. I always like to show this also in schools come. Uh instead of defining in one sentence what's computer science and struggling with finding a good comprehensive sentence, I like to show uh a lot of examples. And um so, this is this is from from some some guy who makes a lot of these maps of different areas. And he's fairly diligent. I think it's it's quite well done. There's not not a lot missing or misclassified or so on. And he has a nice YouTube video where he goes through it bit by bit.

12:45 MAP OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

13:23 The important high-level color coding is there's this engineering side, building computing machines, there's the theory side, and there's applications uh where you take this computer science technique plus something else. Um and so that's also what I'll try for the taster days, show the kids something from each area. So I'll I'll try to balance your lesson topics a bit well, balance the schedules by choosing the lesson topics for the days. So that we show them a bit from all the different areas. Um I mean, you probably have some understanding of most of these bits. Um and you can you can probably have a feel for how different they are in in how you apply them or how uh what type of jobs that you could lead into. So my point here is uh it's quite a diverse field. Um programming is just such a tiny bit of it, maybe somewhere here. And there's a lot more to it. Um so we don't which also means if you if you're not so much into programming or into building robots or whatever other bit that is dominating the public perception, that doesn't mean that computer science is not your thing. Uh it's it's so broad that you may just find your other niche for where you're comfortable.

14:42 In terms of curriculum, uh I asked you to watch this this talk by one of the architects of the national curriculum document. Um uh I think it's it's a very nice talk and very compelling.

14:55 some of a brief run through uh what you've done there. So Uh only have to show this from here. So what's the definition? Uh that's pretty much just copying what he said or what he had on the slide. Uh but it's good to recap that. He says computer science uh it is um Starting with the term, did he say computer science or computing at that point? Well, let's say uh his definition of the field is the study of information, computation, and communication. And uh both in in natural and in artificial systems. Uh I guess that's what what you all found. So far, so good. Um He lists a lot of reasons uh why we want to teach this to everyone. Um yeah, one thing he picks up on is uh an overly heavy focus on the skills and technology side in the previous curriculum.

16:15 And he wants to fix that to bring more of the the subject discipline in uh as it is in other fields. Yeah, another big uh another big thing he picks up on is is this idea of having agency in the world. So, not believing that uh some uh outer worldly people in the Silicon Valley built these devices and programmed them for us and we can just live with whatever uh we get from this.

16:48 Uh well, I asked you about the number of myths. I was just checking if you watched it till the end, I guess. Um And this is the bit where um a bit more open. So, what kind of examples um did we see for teaching a concept that doesn't really teach a skill or a technique or technology, but really um a conceptual idea that's key computer science. Um Okay. Uh one example I I saw was the the sorting network video.

17:28 Uh okay, concept of buses. You want to comment on that? I don't remember what he said in the video about that. Or is that Well, it's maybe from outside the video. Yeah, okay.

17:51 Yeah, the finite state machines with the words. Uh Yeah, communication. Like uh this there's a lot of fundamental problems around communication. Not just the the key exchange that he alluded to, but other things like um in distributed systems, how can you build consensus if you can't trust people? There's a lot of things where there's hard mathematical theoretical uh advances that led to things. Uh Right. Cool. So I hope you found the video somewhat uh helpful. You learned something from it or at least uh was a bit inspirational. Now Uh okay, yeah, before we come to the curriculum, I think this is Uh the way we I tried to use the terms in in the module matches somewhat what what Simon used. So he says computing is the entirety of the subject. That's what the why the national curriculum also bears that name. Uh and it it has subfields, computer science, information technology, and digital literacy.

18:30 Computing vs. Computer Science vs. ICT/IT vs. Coding vs....

19:01 Uh so computer science for him is is a subset of that of that of computing where that's the focus on the scientific part. Um So all these questions that we discussed, I guess the the question was correctly computer science. That's uh information, computation, and and communication.

19:23 Uh IT is probably quite clear. That's all the the hardware things plus what's needed to build them. Uh digital literacy is is a bit more vague, right? Uh I think it's part of it is is being safe online and all these these uh soft areas, but they might be um a few more more technical sides to it. I mean Uh a minimal amount of of programming and understanding what computers can do might be counted as as digital literacy as well. Yeah, so just be very I'll try to use the terms like that. So, computing when we talk about the bigger subject and computer science when we talk about the slightly narrower scientific practical study of computation. That's not how everyone uses the terms.

20:23 All right. So, they gave this long talk uh and as that's what they came up with. Uh that's the national curriculum. I don't know if you've looked this up before. The thing that's staggering for me, this is it, right? This is the whole thing. Uh it's these three pages. Uh and it covers all the years primary up to GCSE uh for the core subjects. Um So, this is necessarily super high level. If you zoom in a bit, I don't know if you can at all read this. Uh let's zoom in to the key stage three bit. Uh okay.

21:02 Doesn't like the zooming in too much. Running out of I probably shouldn't have done this. Uh you will see that it lists very high-level principles uh almost nothing about how you teach that uh and even the content themselves are just high-level uh not just Okay, step number one. Out of RAM. Uh that's that's not good.

22:10 A much more stable model how to um how to handle this. Yeah. You if you run out of out of RAM on Android, there's a clear process to close some apps. Um and to a good degree not much else happens.

22:26 Um desktop laptop operating systems are still not not that stable. You're not supposed to let it happen. All right. Shall we dare to try again? I'll go one step at a time.

22:54 Not touching it. Okay. So, computational abstractions that model the state and behavior of real world problems and physical systems. So, it sounds like writing some simulations. Uh is that discrete event simulations or do they program that in Python or do they just uh ponder about this on piece of paper? That's That's left open. Um other things are more concrete. They should learn two programming languages, some uh probably a Scratch plus Python these days most of the time. And a little bit about some data structures. So, that's already a substantial, right? They should learn a little bit about uh the base the basic building blocks there. And some Boolean logic and a few other things. Uh but I think uh you see for every topic it's just this two to three lines of text. It's very high-level still.

23:55 Uh Scratch. Yeah, something block-based. I think that's what's meant. Because this is what um if you if you start from Key Stage 1, etc. So, uh I've seen this in primary school. They they all learn a little bit of Scratch Junior and they build some uh scenes or little little animations. And so, that's all block-based, so they don't have to be bothered with the syntax of some programming language.

24:19 Pardon? Yeah, which you would use on the machine, which is similar to Scratch, but it's in Python. Gamified. Very very good. I think one one problem in that space is uh it takes a lot of time for for some new ideas to get to the classroom. And we'll we'll get to that with the lesson planning a bit, right? It's It's just a lot of effort to change your lessons. Uh and there's some friction, right? You have to be a threshold better than what's there before plus robust and uh scalable and all these things before it it gets adopted. Uh but I'm I'm not uh I'm not surprised that there's better things than Scratch uh by any means. Now, what what happens uh once when such a document gets published, which is very vague, but the schools are forced to adopt it? Someone jumps in uh and develops a curriculum, and this is depending on the subject can be different different players.

25:28 In more traditional subjects, I think often uh the publishers of books stepped in and did that. So, for maths, there's certain standard books, and then teachers can grab them, they can even buy more material that goes along with the book. Um for computing, it seems that uh we found a different way. There were basically two uh two in parallel. So, what started um from this initiative of bringing computing into the curriculum is a grassroots organization uh Computing at School, which is by and large a big forum for all computer science teachers. You can just computing teachers, pardon. Uh you can just go there, make an account, and then you can share your ideas. And it's as structured as this sounds, right? Uh it's super hard to find anything and navigate. Uh on the other hand, there's lots of people full of energy there. However, it took uh or well, for more than a decade the curriculum was there, and um I think it's still patchwork uh that they um they they they wrote a document with some um more concrete ideas how to teach this.

26:45 Uh I'm not sure how successful it was. Um There's a another attempt now, which is more recent um which is a bit more top-down. Basically the the Raspberry Pi Foundation got a lot of funding and it's now investing heavily in building curriculums. And they came up with a full curriculum for the entire stages. For every little lesson they worked out exactly how your how you can teach this. It's a massive resource. Uh I think it's only been finished last year so I I haven't met a teacher who says, "Yeah, I just took this and applied it." because they all had something that they were developing themselves by that time. But it's an interesting development. So I I encourage you to look at both a bit. Um again, mostly background knowledge but what's what's useful for this is if you want to gauge what are kids likely to know when they come to us. You can have a look at what these um reference implementations of the the national curriculum do.

27:52 Uh that can give you a um some idea of what what they might have done. Now I'm I'm trying to phrase this super carefully because I've seen so so huge differences in how much the kids really took from this. Uh it's hard to say.

28:12 Yeah, the others um If you have a look the past exam questions give you a very very short summary of what the topics are that they probably have covered. As for for GCSEs, I think. Uh and these are these are some That's a that's a different thing. I can comment on that um offline. It's probably not so relevant for us now.

28:37 So yes, the the national curriculum is quite short. Um several people have jumped in to fill that with more detail and life. So uh you just have to dig these things up.

28:59 A little focus on Key Stage 3 because we try to target them. Why? If you can convince a few more students that computer science is interesting and is approachable to them. Um they have the choice at this at this time to choose it. And that probably sets them for up for a different trajectory.

29:33 This is again the topics from the national curriculum for Key Stage 3 pulled out. Um Try to find one of those bullets that it connects to. Now it shouldn't replicate really what they do in school. Otherwise, right? They they come to your lesson and say, "Oh yeah, we've done this just last week. I'll go and snore." Um but it's helpful if you can tie what you do a little bit to something that they already know. So that's just for your convenience, the list again.

30:10 Uh this is same curriculum as before, just the Key Stage 3 link. This is specific sub page on this forum Computing at School for secondary school, but this again um I thought I find it time consuming to navigate.

30:30 Uh any questions so far on this? So what we covered is what the students have are supposed to have seen. Um so the that's the that's the question about when the national curriculum came into force. So this says published 2013. But it definitely Yeah, I think this is this is a point to pick up on uh apart from the curriculum and apart from teachers uh maybe needing to skill up etc. and learn new things, there's other pressures on schools which are not very healthy in my sometimes. Uh they compete in these in these leagues um Now, you know, competition can be fruitful, but uh as soon as you start to measure something that measure is is no longer a good indicator of the actual thing you're trying to measure because the people start playing games. Um yeah, that's quite pronounced in England I would say or England Wales. Yeah. It's a bit unfortunate.

33:37 Okay, this is this is two points I want to want to put on the recording as well. So, one is for the specific teaching part, there's a spec for the exam and that might be fleshed out in much more detail than the national curriculum.

33:52 For the specific keep the national curriculum short so that book publishers have a better chance to flesh it out. Doesn't seem it didn't seem to work out for computing. Not that I know of. Uh it's They're just popping up now written by academics at universities. So, it's it's weird Yeah, if computing is perceived as a niche, yeah.

34:40 Right, the the other thing you pointed out is um that that the teachers might just have had some crash course and not really studied computer science. Uh that might still be true, but it's it's getting a little better over time. So, uh more and more schools have a a proper teaching a proper computing leads who who learned the subject like like you did, right? This is uh one of the uh outcomes of this module might be that you go into teaching. At least that's uh the goal is to give you a taste of what that might be like.

35:47 Well, what one thing okay, I I don't know about the pay uh at sixth form versus But the teachers go into schools they often start right at the level of a computing leads. And that's paid substantially better than the other standard entry-level teachers. So, because there's a short supply, they can actually get better salaries. If that stacks up against an industry salary is is a tough call, but industry starting salaries also not brilliant for everyone.

36:25 No, you can't yeah, don't compare with Silicon Valley salaries. That's uh because uh the living cost is so absurd. I think um a standard starting cost for an IT professional here if you leave after bachelor's, say, maybe maybe 30 grand is is a good starting salary and that's uh probably what a teacher can make in a few years as well. So, the the gap is not as huge, but Yeah, so there's some perks. The schools are trying hard. Yeah, that's It's good to hear. Um I hope this incentivizes the right people, right, to go into teaching. Uh let me touch on this this last bit. Um I'll I'll keep it short, but uh I think you you need to know about the terms at least. Uh so, widening participation, uh maybe the term is self-explanatory, but I don't think it actually is in the narrow sense that the uh the university sometimes um understands it.

37:25 Widening Participation

37:38 Uh the core idea is to bring bring pupils from from all sorts of backgrounds to university that otherwise for whatever reason. Uh a big goal, especially in the Russell Group, they put this on their agenda, etc. Um Uh our taster days are officially also part of this. Uh I usually try to invite schools from less affluent areas to come, but also try to mix it a bit. Uh because um I don't want to I don't think we should overdo it, but um it's it's an attempt to bring bring schools that haven't been here before. So, I try to reach many many different schools and show them at least, you know, there's there's a campus, there are people doing computer science. They're not running around in in weird clothing all the time. Uh It's simple things sometimes. There's a central team so the university makes the statement that they take this serious uh and they have a central team that that uh has funding and has capacity to run programs. Um it's a little more than um a workshop here.

38:51 Uh they have a school leavers program where they have like kids over over several years come for for different events. So, I think they're they're doing uh quite a few few good things there. Um Now, my understanding is that widening participation is is often focused on something relatively narrow, which is a bit unfortunate. Uh and it comes from the fact that this is easy to measure. So, what people often look at is the the polar data set. I think this is still the the most recent comprehensive one even though it's quite a few years ago. I didn't put the number down. I think it's it's more than 10 years old, if I remember correctly. So, what this what this data set has is for each post code, you know, small area, uh how many of the 18-year-olds, 18 to 20-year-olds, ah should have written down the precise definition. It's a little it's a little little age bracket that would be the normal the traditional age to go to start um a university um course.

39:07 Higher Education Participation rates

40:02 What percentage of that of the population in that age group is perceiving is pursuing some uh higher education. Uh and then you divide these percentages into quintiles. So, the uh quintile five means that's the 20% of postcodes with the highest percentage of students in higher education. Okay? So, that is clear how the data is to be to be read. Um and I mean, you see Liverpool is basically all quintile one with a few exceptions in in the center. Uh same for Birkenhead uh and large areas around Liverpool as well. Um So, again again, I think the data is uh is a bit dated. I don't know how much this has shifted. Uh it's probably still true that the Liverpool city area is is relatively underrepresented in in higher education. So, uh there's if you want to flip it to something positive, uh it's relatively easy to make some impact with uh relatively simple team uh terms.

41:13 So, if if you just show uh that university is an achievable goal for a few more students, uh specifically in computer science, that can have quite some impact. Uh we had some some lovely, you know, just uh from the from the kids that we had here last year. Uh we talked to them informally a bit and then asked them in some surveys and so, and there were a few commenting, "Oh, this was so cool. I never thought I would like it." and blah blah blah. And now I'm I'm definitely doing computer science with GCSEs and uh it's it's just a handful that are so enthusiastic, but it's a handful you really could potentially set on a trajectory for their life, right? So, that's what you should aim for. I think that's uh good justification for spending some some extra time with them.

42:01 Implications for your lesson plan

42:05 Okay, I tried to uh put that into actionable advice for your lessons. Um from all of today. So, I mentioned this already. Uh Uh Maybe this is less important now uh because there's more material available, but teachers are often quite keen on picking up new ideas. Maybe not exactly your lesson, but some new cool thing that they can apply. They're They're usually very open. Uh I think the um most important bits for me are these these three uh that I mentioned before. Try to make your your lessons relatable. So, picking up things that the school that that the kids would already know. Whether or not they're into tech, whatever that's that is, right? Uh and try to make it relevant to them and make it achievable on different levels. Uh have If you build activities where there's some competition or some competitive element in it, try to build it so that there's a little level of success that everyone can have and then leave some space for those who are more advanced and and more more demanding to have uh have some some more sparring partners there.

43:19 Right? I think as a last comment, I just want to want to rephrase widening participation. I think the idea is is is brilliant and great and broader. Uh it often is uh reduced to this postcode game um just because that's easy to measure. Uh but of course there's many other disadvantage groups. If you uh I don't have the numbers for uh well, for for women you can you can probably look at the numbers easily. Uh Yeah, this Some things are harder to measure. Um but at least you can aim to be inclusive beyond just the the narrow definition of widening participation. That's that's my goal for the Taste of the Race.