Catherine Junior School
Computing
Intent
At Catherine Junior School, our curriculum is designed to provide, through inspiring and engaging experiences, the knowledge and skills to become independent, life-long learners. Our computing curriculum is designed to equip all pupils with important life-skills when using computational thinking in order to help understand the world around them. We recognise that computing is a major aspect of modern day life and therefore we aim to teach the key principles of information, computation and how digital systems work through the medium of programming. Pupils will become socially responsible, autonomous users capable of enjoying and using technology to support their learning across the curriculum and in life, with a key focus on safe and responsible use. We intend to inspire creativity, teach them to be resilient problem solvers and analyse critically during their experience of computing. They will become digitally literate and be active participants of a digital world as these are skills desired in a 21st century workplace.
Aims and Objectives
We believe that every child is entitled to a computing curriculum that prepares them for the future so that every child can flourish. At Catherine Junior School, we have high expectations to enable excellence for all and we base our teaching on the belief that all children have the potential to succeed. All aspects of our eight values in the Catherine Code underpin our curriculum, which promotes our school motto and ethos of ‘Together, we can do it!’ Our curriculum is led by our whole school core principles of oracy, reading, experiences and memory and recall.
We aim to develop learners who:
- Can understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation.
- Can analyse problems in computation terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems and aid recall of key learning.
- Can evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems.
- Are responsible, competent, confident, creative and safe users of information and communication technology.
- Use reasoning, think logically and work systematically to solve problems both independently and with others.
- Connect knowledge to other things they have learnt and recall what they already know to apply knowledge gained.
- Communicate using a range of sophisticated computing terminology and express themselves using oracy skills in a variety of ways.
- Have a growth mindset and a positive ‘can-do’ attitude towards the subject of Computing.