Earl Mortimer College and Sixth Form Centre

What do we want our students to learn?

• To inspire students’ interest in Computing and promote an aspiration for knowledge and advancement
• To provide students with a range of utilisable skills and knowledge to support their ongoing prosperity in a growingly-technological world.
• To stretch and challenge students to use their own creativity and problem-solving skills to flourish in the subject and beyond.

How is our curriculum designed?

At Key Stage 3, we teach the National Curriculum using a wide range of resources and have developed three unique pathways which cater for all abilities: helping hand, core and fast track. This enables all students to access materials suitable for their own unique abilities in strengths. Real-life problems are used as much as possible such as: analyzing the reasons for the cholera outbreak in Soho during 1854, looking at how the enigma code was solved, how coding and encryption is used on the internet.

Each student is given access to all lesson materials via our moodle based VLE (http://vle.emc.hereford.sch.uk) and also via their own cloud-based storage using the Office 365 system. All materials are issued in electronic format and assessment is also completed electronically by the specialist teachers.

Year 7 – Students will complete a baseline assessment test which will assess the work that has been completed during KS2. This will then enable us to customize resources to each individual student when they start their computing course. During year 7 students will study the following topics: Under the hood of a computer, Think like a computer scientist, Drawing and manipulating shapes, Creating an animation, How the web works, Programming in Python(1), Programming a calculator, Creating apps in AppInventor (1), Programming a quiz

Year 8 – Students will further develop their skills and understanding of Computer Science, Digital Literacy and Information Technology, begin to develop their own unique solutions to a wide variety of problems and will further develop their computational thinking skills. Topics studied will include: operating systems, binary, instruction set design, programming using selection and Boolean statements, algorithms – Searching and Sorting, recursion and looping, Think like a computer scientist, Drawing and manipulating shapes, Creating an animation, How the web works, Programming in Python(2), Creating apps in AppInventor (2)

Year 9 – Students build towards working at GCSE level and will develop skills in meeting the needs of users and developing algorithms involving sequence, selection and repetition. They look at how algorithms are used in a variety of applications such as game development, searching and indexing web sites. Students will study the following topics: Cracking codes – binary characters, cyphers and encryption, Representing sounds and images using binary codes, Using database structures, Digital circuits and logic, Programming in Python(3), Programming in AppInventor (3), Individual programming project.

How does our curriculum link to wider school values?

Engagement – a broad variety of topics in Computing are completed throughout KS3 to give all students an opportunity to engage in different tasks in Computing.

Mindset – attempts to show that all genders can excel in Computing and follow a career in this industry as it can be seen as male orientated based on the majority who choose it as an option at KS4.

Challenge – Classwork, supplemented by home learning, provide an opportunity for students to continue to stretch themselves; for example in Programming in Python gives students chance to dive deeper in to tasks to progress their understanding and knowledge further.