Download SUMMERHILL SCHOOL GEOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT

SUMMERHILL SCHOOL COMPUTING DEPARTMENT
STAFFING
The department consists of two full-time and four part-time Computing
teachers.
Andrew Dixon
Diane Reynolds
Adrian Creswell
Owen Hutton
Mark Cox
Osborne Bennett
Head of Department
Full-time Computing Teacher
Deputy Headteacher
Head of Business Studies
Science Teacher (non specialist)
Design Technology Teacher (non specialist)
There is also an administrative assistant to support Computing – Lynn
Wilding.
GCSE Options
Our 2014 Year 11 students will be the last to take the EDEXCEL AIDA and
CiDA course options, and we have now moved to the EDEXCEL GCSE
Computing qualification which we started last year in Year 9.
AiDA (Level 2)
entire cohort
CiDA (Level 2)
option students
2011
2012
2013
93%
90%
94%
81%
89%
89%
KS3 students are taught in mixed ability tutor groups and all years have two
50-minute lessons of Computing per week. Our programme of study in KS3
has been changing over the last few years with government guidelines, and
we now developing a feature rich syllabus with a strong focus on
programming with Scratch, Flowol and Lego NXT.
As of September 2013 we have also
started a new Computer Science option
course in 2013 which has heavy focus
on high level programming. We have
Visual Studio running in a virtual
Windows Server environment that allows
use to have Visual Studio (VB and C#)
as well as Python and PHP for server
side scripting. Our main programming
language of choice in Computer Science
is Visual Basic.
FACILITIES
There are three main air conditioned ICT suites at Summerhill, each with
approximately 30 stations, and printer/scanner facilities. The fourth ICT room
is a smaller suite of 16 stations and can be booked by other departments. To
prepare our students for programming in KS3 we have invested in a class set
of Lego NXT robots which have a variety of sensors that can then be
programmed through the Lego NXT studio, this provides a very tactile,
engaging and visual approach to learning and programming.
FUTURE PLANS
We are currently experimenting with the use of mobile devices, iPads with
Apple TV, for staff as a teaching and learning tool. For students we are also
planning for each of them to have a mobile device to support their learning
from 2015.