Mr Guthrie's Computing website

2014 National Curriculum Computing

 

The 2014 National Curriculum for Computing essentially has 7 strands: Algorithms, Programming, Data, Data representation, Hardware and processing and Information Technology.  What we used to know as ICT is now largely put into the Information Technology category.

 

So is it just about programming now?  Well, no, but that forms a very large part of it.  To be able to program, you need to be able to break down problems into their component parts, which is essentially what algorithms is all about, equally you need to know about data (understanding data types, logical operators etc) to be able to program too and data representation and processing are useful too.  Hardware is learning about computing systems and how the bits inside work, so there is a lot of computing there to learn.

 

The good new is that you can be really creative with the new curriclum, that by learning problem solving and computational thinking (logical approaches to problems), you can improve across the whole of school and not just in Computing.