CAS Tyneside Hub Meeting Newcastle University
On February the 27th over 50 Teachers attended a meeting in The Beehive at Newcastle University to come together and discuss the impact of the curriculum consultation document on teaching ICT and computing in our schools.The School of Computing Science hosted the event led by Mike Carter from Tyn Can Learning. Dr. Nick Cook from Newcastle University set out how North East Universities were willing to support North East schools in areas of knowledge skills and capability and to work with schools to introduce computing science and coding into the curriculum. Mike Carter outlined the present consultation document and pointed to the unbalanced nature of the document and asked colleagues to seriously look at the document and take part in the consultation process to try and change the document so that there is much more balance including Digital Literacies, ICT and Computing. Stephen Reid from A Higher Place shared his thoughts regarding the place of creativity in the curriculum and the use of programs such as MineCraft to introduce coding concepts to young people especially when combined with the Raspberry Pi. Delegates were asked to discuss in small groups the best way for the Universities to provide meaningful support to schools and feed back to Nick so that a CPD plan could be drawn up to offer to schools.
The delegates at the meeting decided that the next meeting in the Summer term should concentrate on harnessing the expertise in the region to organise a sharing session so that colleagues could learn from each other and formulate good practice across the region.
As an after thought I created a Wordle from the contents of the “Computing” consultation document.
The elements of the 2014 Computing Curriculum
Tyn Can Learning 