Computing Lead – Mr L. Cara

Through the Computing curriculum at St Mary’s, we aim to give our pupils the life-skills necessary to embrace and utilise technology in a safe and responsible manner. We believe that through our computing teaching, we are preparing children for workplaces of the future, jobs that may not have even been invented yet, and giving them the skills to truly thrive in the 21^st century.

Children will become independent users of a range of technologies and devices to become digitally literate. Our programme provides opportunities to develop computational thinking and problem solving skills as well as creativity and resilience. We use a variety of hardware and software to support learning across the curriculum and in bespoke practices to ensure accessibility for every child.

We aim to instil a love of computing in our pupils to encourage further study of the subject and create digital citizens with an understanding of themselves within their local and global community.

Aims of the Computing Curriculum

The national curriculum for Computing aims to ensure that all pupils:

• understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation
• analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems
• evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems
• become responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.

Our Computing curriculum allows children to create digital work through a range of hardware and software. There is focus on the. Pupils are able to express their opinions of artwork with sophisticated use of language.

• Computational thinking (abstraction, decomposition, pattern recognition and algorithms)
• E-safety
• Digital literacy
• Computers and hardware