Best Practice

Ideas to engage pupils with coding

With coding a part of the new computing curriculum, we asked some young coders from the Young Rewired State initiative for their advice on how to engage students with code. First, Ruth Nicholls focuses on the challenges ahead.

Young Rewired State is a not-for-profit organisation which hosts events for young coders around the world. It is also a worldwide community which equips them with a powerful support system, helping to foster their skills and enabling them to learn from each other. We work with thousands of young coders each year – so we know there are huge numbers out there who are well-versed with all aspects of programming already.

However, there will inevitably be a significant proportion of students who will have never touched a piece data or written a command in their lives.

This poses a huge challenge for teachers delivering the new curriculum: how can they use the existing ability of the self-taught programmers in their classes (whose programming skills may well exceed their own) but keep all kids engaged in the classroom whether they are beginners or digital natives?

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