ICT

COMPUTATIONAL THINKING AND ALGORITHMS

The Year 7 students have been improving their skills in Computational Thinking by creating a number of algorithms for everyday tasks. Using Google Drawings, the students have been producing flowcharts that demonstrate their skills in sequencing, selection and iteration. These tasks have included things that the students probably never think of as being an algorithm such as crossing the road safely and charging their Chromebook but they very quickly learned the importance of getting all the steps in the right order and ensuring that no steps were missed out in order to achieve the end result.

One of the new concepts the students have learned is looping (iteration). They had to work out that you don’t just look left and right once when crossing a road otherwise you might get run over!  When the question asked “Is the Road Clear Both Ways?”, the students learned that they had to keep looking left and right, over and over again, until they could answer “yes” to this question.

After completing some flowcharts in Google Drawings, the students were given some manual tasks to complete such as Baking a Cake and Feeding Your Dog. In groups, the students had to plan out the flowchart using all the steps given and they then had to use arrows and connectors to show how the flowchart could be followed. These skills learned in Year 7 will be invaluable for students who go on to learn programming at Years 9, 10, 11 and 12.

Below are some pictures of our busy students completing their flowcharts.

Shirley Munro

IT Teacher