KritiRecharge 2012 OnLine: Summer School Programming

Lifelong Learning

and IT solutions

Jobs for today's

learner have not

been thought

of … yet!

Summer School 2012

Introduction to

Programming

Why Programming? An Introduction.

Pick up your mobile, look at the social app to find out what your friends are doing. Switch on your TV, cook your TV or microwave dinner, select your favourite sitcom and settle down for the evening. You have just benefited from somebody else's ability to program.

Programming affects everybody in today's world. A quick search of the Google database to find out how many software developers there are among 6.5 billion people on this Earth is easily done!

How many do you think there are? (See link in Bibliography , to check out for yourself). The answer according to WikiAnswers in 8.5 million people in America. This is only 0.0001 % of the world population. You can be part of the much needed group of UK programmers!

A programmer can be:

• writing websites,
• writing apps for Android and Apple mobiles
• producing games
• running large databases for organisations like the NHS or Orange
• producing macros to make spreadsheets work
• producing control software for the Mars rover, Curiosity!

These are just a few examples! Any of these activities makes you a programmer!

What is on offer?

Aims of the Summer School

To introduce the importance and fun of programming to interested 13 year old plus pupils. A world of leisure and work use await those that can program.

Key Skills

1. Producing a Blog through Blogger (requires a Google Account) to act as a fun record of experiences (Learning Log/Portfolio of Learning) and provide potential employers and like-minded programmers with a window onto your thinking. This may also be a basis for your CV for apprenticeships and college applications.
2. To provide a practical introduction to programming using new innovative software designed to open the sense of awe and wonder of discovering how to solve a task!
3. To want to learn more!

Outline of Summer School Manual

Keeping Safe!

This section gives advice on how to safeguard your own and other's safety on the internet! This is the most IMPORTANT section!

• For Students
  Simple list of dos and don'ts
  Links to online safety websites
• For Parents
  Links to online safety sites for parents
  Safe Use of Internet
  Link to Facebook safeguarding documents
  Safeguarding of students within the online Summer School

Skills Summer School aims to provide

• Use of Cloud Computing and Blogging!
• Familiarity with basic programming concepts.
• Ability to write a basic or advanced programme using independent but guided learning!
• Concepts of Teleworking - 21^st Century Working!

Career paths and qualifications

Links for students and parents to investigate job areas, career paths and how qualifications fit in to the National Curriculum and Professional bodies awarding structure. Use of BeKnown from Monster on Facebook to start building a Web CV. This section is a future career guide!

Resource sites including Software

Links to handy software!Section on how to obtain software to achieve the aims. I prefer to use free Open Source software. For example this document is written in OpenOffice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice ). All software used will be Open Source!

Companies and Groups

Real company links and focus groups in the world of work

Courses

This is a section detailing some of the free courses that we will use and their websites.

Bibliography (What I have looked up and referred to!)

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_software_developers_in_the_world

What next?

Activity 1: Get Connected

First of all we need to get connected! The way is to get the responsible parent to email pcjspalding@gmail.com for further details. We can then give access to the Facebook page for the Summer School.