Teaching Primary Computing (revised)

Wr. Martin Burrett

Pub. Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Curriculum Basics series provides non-specialist primary school teachers with subject knowledge and full teaching programmes in a variety of key primary curriculum subjects. This is a revised and up-to-date hands-on guide to planning and delivering primary computing lessons in a fun and refreshing way.

The original version was a cracking resource, so I was excited to see what this revised edition had to offer. Updated throughout, the biggest difference for me is the addition of a chapter on the use of AI in the classroom. More on that later. Like the original version, the book is broken into individual chapters for each year group, and each has lesson plans and activities relating to Digital Literacy, Computing, and eSafety. I especially like the "e-Savvy" sections, and in particular the Key Stage 1 material as it is so tricky to pitch this topic to younger children.

The AI chapter is a welcome addition, particularly as it's something I'm keen to explore in the classroom. I've used chatgpt a fair bit, and have had ideas of getting children to use it to co-author flash fiction etc., so it was useful to find a bank of resources for other AI endeavours such as creating music and video. The book's real highlight for me comes at the end, when Martin discusses AI and eSafety, and how AI really cannot be trusted to give you factually accurate information (see footnote). This chapter is a belter and is very thought-provoking (and class discussion-provoking).

Martin astutely observes that every school has its own unique computing ecosystem, from rickety trolleys filled with very nearly dead (or very actually dead) tablets, right through to state of the art computer suites. As such, the task of teaching Computing is not only about being able to bring the curriculum to life in an engaging and relevant way. Us brave, intrepid souls must also make the best of what we have at our disposal. To this end, Martin offers links to free online tools and resources, and makes accessibility the thread that runs through all of the lesson plans presented here.

Speaking as a Computing specialist, I can say confidently that this book is useful and has given me food for thought on a number of topics. For the non-specialist, this is surely essential reading and I recommend it for its completeness, accessibility, and good humour.

Footnote - my other AI misadventures

I was doing some research recently and enlisted chatgpt to find me 10 research papers to save me time rummaging around Google Scholar. It gave me a list of articles, replete with authors, dates, even doi numbers. Not ONE of them existed. When challenged, it replied with the AI equivalent of righteous indignation, and presented me with 10 alternative papers (none of which existed either). More recently, I attempted to generate (I'm loathe to use the word create) some AI melodies (I'm loathe to use the word music), with appalling results across the board. Every track was just so utterly soulless, just a meandering random nonsense. I think it's interesting how a machine can produce instrumental sounds (I'm actually loathe even to use the word melodies now), but the output is dreadful. AI image generation is somewhat more hopeful, but it currently has no understanding of nuance. For example, I asked it to generate a cartoon monkey, which it did. Seeking to get the same monkey in different poses proved impossible as it simply generates a different monkey each time. Asking it to present the monkey in different clothes also proved impossible, and asking it to have the monkey giving a thumbs-up resulted in images so terrifying I'm only now just beginning to be able to speak about it. I've talked to the children about how computers have no intelligence of their own, and AI art generation is a perfect way to illustrate it.