Computing Child Part of the CAQA group

Coding for young people

Teaching children to build, not just to use

Programming and computing for young people, taught by building things that work rather than by watching videos about building things.

IWhat we do

Three things, done properly.

i

Programming

Real languages and real tools, at a pace that suits the age.

ii

Building things

Projects that do something, because a program that runs is its own motivation.

iii

Computational thinking

Decomposition and debugging, which transfer to everything else.

IIWhat goes wrong

The two failures we see most.

We publish these because most of the value in hiring anyone is knowing which mistakes are common, and that knowledge is not worth hiding.

Drag and drop forever

Block based tools are a good start and a poor destination. Children capable of typing code are often kept in blocks for years.

Rewarding the finished screenshot

Copying a tutorial to a working result teaches following instructions. The learning is in the debugging.

IIIHow we work

We tell you what we find.

Including when the answer is that you do not need what you came to ask for. Anyone who never says that is not giving you information, they are giving you an invoice.

Scope

Where something needs a legal opinion, a financial audit or a clinical judgement, we will say so and stop rather than improvise past the edge of what we do.

Start a conversation.

Tell us the situation rather than the service you think you need. We would rather start from your problem.