National Centre for Computing Education

Home teaching week 5

National Centre for Computing Education -

Hello and welcome! Are you ready for week 5 of our home teaching programme?

Week 5 activities

To all teachers and parents:

  • If you've just come across our resources, don't worry! You can start from the beginning of our multi-week schemes of work.
  • You can also get help with activities by attending one of our friendly Q&A sessions for all key stages. You can find the timings for these on each key stage's homepage.

Key Stage 1

  • In this Dance Moves activity, children will make up a dance routine and create the instructions for a partner to follow. Could you create the next Gangnam Style viral dance craze?

Key Stage 2

  • Unleash your inner artist and learn about Boolean logic along the way by creating a Paintbox programme in Scratch.

Key Stage 3

  • Try our new Colourful Creations resource: you will learn how to create a dictionary of colours in Python that turns hard-to-remember colour codes into friendly names.

  • If you want to continue developing your phone app, check out lesson 5. This week is all about getting user feedback (remember you can also start at lesson 1)!

  • For lesson 3 of our Cybersecurity scheme of work, you will explore techniques used by hackers and understand brute force attacks, hacktivists, script kiddies, and DDoS attacks.

Key Stage 4

  • In Boolean Logic on the Isaac Computer Science platform, you will learn how to summarise the different possible inputs and outputs for each of the types of gate in a truth table.

  • In Networks, you will explore how data is transferred over Ethernet and WiFi.

  • On our Basics of Python programming course, Martin introduces us to iterables - understanding lists of data and how to use them in your programmes.

Key Stage 5

  • If you are an A level student, or a GCSE student transitioning to A level this September, try our Object-Oriented Programming in Python course. This week, you will learn the difference between class variables and instance variables and put them to use inside your labyrinth/maze/dungeon!

Home Teacher Spotlight

This week, we were sent some excellent work from the KS3 Cybersecurity module by teacher Peter Johnson and his students Izzy, Maya, Lyndsay, and Pietro.

Here's a example of a phishing email that one of them was working on!

And here's what Peter had to say about his experiences with home teaching so far...

"At Gosforth Junior High Academy, as part of our home schooling program, we've been using the Key Stage 3 Cybersecurity unit from the home teaching resources on teachcomputing,org. Within just a few hours of assigning the first lesson, "You and Your Data", on our VLE, I was already receiving work back from our students and was delighted with the quality of work they were producing and the thoughtful, considered responses they were giving to the tasks they had been set.
Students were showing a real understanding of the topic - a reflection of the interesting and engaging tutorial videos included within the lesson, which give students a real insight into the value of data and how and why businesses collect their data and use it to profile them . These units make a great addition to any home learning program and show that achieving real quality learning in a home environment  is possible."

Thanks for taking the time to drop us a line Peter, and a big WELL DONE to your students too!