Teaching Programming to 5- to 11-year-olds

Build your subject knowledge and develop your skills in teaching programming

Programming gives children the opportunity to be creators rather than just consumers of technology. Instead of only using existing programs to complete tasks, children can use the programs they have written themselves to solve problems and develop new ideas.

This four-week course will help you become more confident in teaching programming to young children aged 5-11 years old. As well as developing your own understanding of programming, you’ll also investigate a range of strategies that you can use to help your pupils.

Delve into programming concepts

On this course you’ll learn about the key programming concepts of algorithms, sequence, repetition, selection, and variables.

You’ll experience a number of different programming languages suitable for young people, and use your new knowledge to modify and create programs in the block-based language Scratch.

The course will also introduce you to program design. You’ll learn about and experience all of the stages of program development from idea to running code.

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to design and code your own Scratch programs, as well as being able to support your young learners as they begin their coding journeys.

Links to the Teach Computing Curriculum

This course is created to align with the Teach Computing Curriculum (TCC), a free resource containing all the content you need to teach computing to children.

As well as undertaking several activities from the TCC during this course, you will use the knowledge you have gained to review a TCC teaching resource and adapt it for your learners’ needs.

This course is designed for educators of all types, in schools or informal settings. It has been designed to help you teach young children how to program.

All software used in this course is either free to download or can be accessed via the web. You will need access to Scratch 3, either online or installed on your computer. You’ll need to create a Scratch account to share and save your programs online.

• Programming and algorithms
• Welcome to the course
• What is programming?
• What's an algorithm?
• Algorithms to code
• Repetition
• Identifying patterns in tasks
• Implementing repetition
• Different types of repetition
• Selection
• Conditions - True or False
• Implementing selection
• Program flow with selection
• Variables
• What are variables?
• How can you use variables?
• Reflection