This morning I have been going through my curriculum overview for Years 3 to 8 looking at how I am covering Programming in my ICT planning. Here is a brief outline of how it currently stands:
Year 3 = Programming using the Big Traks
Year 4 = Logo
Year 5 = 2DIY and Scratch
Year 6 = “Here Be Dragons” project on algorithms
Year 7 = Programming interactive fiction using Quest / HTML
Year 8 = Python
This evening I began to experiment with the online screen capture service Screenr in order to create simple tutorials for Quest, the Text Adventure creator. I have managed to set it so that Screenr tweets when I publish a video and have also published them on YouTube so that I can display them here.
This morning in ICT my Year 7 class relived my childhood by playing the classic Text Adventure game, Zork. Before Half Term the children were looking at how games consoles have developed over the years as a way of understanding memory and processing speed and so I thought it would be interesting for them to see what one of the most popular games of the early 80’s was like. They spent the first half of the lesson playing the game and then I explained to them that over the next couple of weeks they will be making their own text adventure game called “Escape From Winchester House”. They will be using a free piece of software called the Quest Development Toolkit (QDK) which allows them to create quite simple text adventures but also has the scope for more complicated programming. This will be the first time I have used this with children and so is a bit of an experiment before I rewrite my ICT curriculum over the Summer. Next year I hope to spend a longer period of time with the children creating their text adventures.
Chris Leach 