Computing meets PVPG

Recently, we have been enjoying our computing lessons so much that the children are using AI(artificial intelligence) at home. It is so lovely to see this high level of engagement and even a couple of children have made story books (with the help of AI). It has now become a regular occurrence to read them as we walk down the corridor to break. With us hooked with AI, Miss thought it would be a good idea to incorporate this into our grammar application lesson. The children loved prompting AI to generate a short paragraph with no punctuation that they had to then identify the verb/verb phrase, subject, coordinating conjunction, leftovers and then punctuate to identify the main clauses. Obviously this was my favourite short paragraph!

Computing – animation

After returning from half term, we had an opportunity to work more independently on the skills we practiced before half term. Before half term, we were asked to create an animation however, this was something we’d very little experience with it so depended on the expert.

In this session, children were able to complete the task with minimal support showing they had learned how to successfully put the blocks together to create an animation.

Computing in Crew MI continues…

Today we continued with our how to be safe online unit and focussed on online communication. We discussed what different forms of communication we can do online and then we explored the advantages and disadvantages of online communication. We discussed why some people use emojis, memes and gifs to communicate and even had a go at creating some of our own. We watched a clip which showed us the importance of asking permission from someone before posting pictures etc… Next, we looked at some different scenarios and judged whether the comments were negative and positive. We discussed the impact that negative comments have on people’s mental health and turned the negative comments into more positive ones. Finally, we talked about what to do if we came across any negative online communication.

Creating an animation

This afternoon, we continued with our computing unit where we had to create n animation following some instructions. Erik was our expert because he is a whizz on scratch which meant he was able to coach some of the children through the steps. This is something we will continue with next time as we’re hoping now that we’ve been shown how to do it, we can be bit more independent next time.

Coding – Scratch

On Friday afternoon, we moved on to the next unit of computing which is about coding. We had some time to tinker with scratch before working through some activities. One of these activities was to create a loop of code which basically means that the sprite will continually do an action (on a loop). We really enjoyed being able to tinker with and explore scratch and look forward to exploring this more in future computing lessons.

Debugging!

In our latest computing session we learnt all about what debugging is (which doesn’t actually have anything to do with real life bugs!), how we identify them in an algorithm and how we can fix them! We then had a go at doing some ‘debugging’ ourselves. We worked in pairs and used maps and directions to spot the ‘bug’. We were really good at this! As a crew we then had a go at rewriting the correct algorithm. We then finished the lesson by sharing everything that we had learnt about ‘debugging’!