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Posted by Andy Brown on 08 October 2014
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Coding at school: teaching teachers how to program
From September 2014 coding is part of the National Curriculum in the UK for all ages. There's a good article summarising what it means for different age groups here.
Personally I'm not convinced that every child has the capacity to program (any more than every adult does) - and I think that those who enjoy coding will probably teach themselves anyway - but that's not the point of this blog.
If you're a primary school or secondary school teacher needing to learn to program, we have four courses which may help you:
| Course | Days | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction to VBA | 2 | VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is a good introductory language, as it runs within any Microsoft Office application and is relatively easy to learn. |
| Introduction to VB.NET | 2 | The grown-up version of VBA, Visual Basic allows you to create stand-alone systems. You wouldn't want to be teaching this at primary school! |
| Introduction to C# | 2 | The sibling of VB.NET, C Sharp or C# provides an alternative language for development (in very much the same way that French provides an alternative form of communication to English). C# is probably winning the popularity war, but it is a bit more "techie". |
| Introduction to SQL | 2 | This isn't a true programming language, but instead provides an instruction set for getting information out of a relational database. |
If you can't see the course that you want here, contact us and we'll consider publishing a special course for IT teachers (perhaps a one-day introduction to what coding is and does, for example).