Each topic has a set of bite-sized theory activities for students to engage with. Students don’t need to complete all the activities, and teachers should be selective about which ones they would like to use with their class. Once completed, these activities provide students with what we call “assets”. They use these assets to create a structured learning record of the topic. There are hundreds of varied activities included in a premium subscription.

NO MORE BORING THEORY LESSONS

Students get bored if teachers stand at the front of the class and go through endless slides of theory and simply answer questions from a text book or worksheet. They want to be more active.

CraignDave resources for A level are varied, including many practical and thought provoking activities. For example, the topic of structure and function of the processor (SLR1) includes:

• A card sort for describing the registers.
• Explaining how small examples relate to processor components. E.g. “5+6” Which component is this relevant to and why?
• Labeling an illustration of the components of a processor.
• Creating an animation of how a computer works.
• Role play for the whole class simulating a fetch, decode, execute cycle on the registers.
• Debating which of 7 considerations matters most to the speed of a processor.
• Creating a table of differences between two architectures.
• Studying an abstraction of a modern processor and producing a case to argue whether it is Von Neumann or Harvard architecture.
• Creating an illustration of pipelining.
• Explaining what relevance Adam Smith’s division of labour in pin manufacturing has to do with processor architecture.
• Illustrating with a Python program how some parts of a program could be pipelined and some can’t.

WORKS GREAT WITH THE FREE VIDEOS, BUT EQUALLY WELL WITHOUT THEM

Craig’n’Dave advocate a flipped classroom model where students watch a video for homework to prepare them in advance for the lesson. It means students can start the activities from the very beginning of the lesson with no chalk and talk time. Equally, you may want to cover or refresh the theory content before students start the activities. Both work equally well. It just depends how much long you want a passive phase of the lesson to be. Effective questioning and interaction with the students is key to success with both models. Flipping the classroom gives you more time for working with individuals. Students can also work at their own pace without waiting for their teacher to explain the next task or for the rest of the class to catch up. We give students all the activities for an SLR in advance unless there is something we want to surprise them with later. That means students are free to work through many of the activities, creating

assets to use in their structured learning record independently.

WHY TEACHERS LOVE OUR RESOURCES

Our resources allow you to be a creative teacher with what might otherwise be dry topics. Tried and tested in our own classrooms, we only use our resources and nothing else to teach Computer Science. Our students achieve the highest grades so we know they work. Some of our most well-loved resources include:

• Whole class rock, paper, scissors competition for illustrating issues in multi-core processing.
• Using ping pong balls for illustrating packets and protocols.
• Modelling the throughput of each scheduling algorithm in a spreadsheet.
• Modelling the page-rank algorithm over time using a spreadsheet.
• Showing the journey from source code to binary code on a real program for the compilation process.
• Whole class family fortunes game for operating systems.

We also have plenty of more simplistic activities that allow students to create suitable assets for their structured learning records. All the activities include everything you need with very little preparation. Model answers are also included so you don’t need a deep subject knowledge to deliver them either.