Making decisions

The course "Making decisions" is aimed at primary school teachers to develop their own knowledge about computing and to learn to program. Due to the move from ICT to computing (in most national curriculums), the course aims to encourage primary teachers from all subject disciplines to think a bit differently, looking at systems and problems in the same way a computer scientist does. Teachers will gain confidence through working on a range of meaningful projects and will be shown ways to introduce programming in their classroom, making learning more engaging. The course will also serve to provide participants with various tools, resources and practices for a more efficient and innovative teaching and learning.

Teachers attending this course have prior knowledge in programming as they have successfully fulfilled the 1st stage course for beginners (moodle course "Let's start coding"). They are familiar with the Scratch programming environment; they have experimented with sprites, input blocks (ask/answer), sequence structure and are also able to write/create simple programs that accomplish specific goals.

This course is valuable for teachers who want to deepen their knowledge in programming as the selection (decision) programming structure will be introduced through which a computer executes one or other set of instructions according to whether a particular condition is met or not. For example, a quiz provides different feedback if the player answers the question correctly or incorrectly.