I don't know if Numpty Physics would work on an IWB but it would certainly be fun and entertaining and educational if it did work.

Alan

Well open source software is all about sharing and working together, I think it is remarkably consistent with some of the language in key stage 1 so they should already be experts :-) Maths and physics are my favourite subjects and there are plenty of things there which would delight and astonish a year 5 class, as this is a fun lesson you can go wild and do some calculus get them to understand what the area under a graph means with an accelerating car or bouncing ball then model that using Step http://edu.kde.org/step/ or maybe explore the first bits of Boyle's law with a particle simulation.

Hi Mary

Personally (and having taught Y5 for a few years now...) I'd go with Peter's suggestion of Scratch.

This will :

• cover ground that they probably won't have seen in their primary schools;
• give them a feel for how programs get written rather than simply using software;
• provide some nice opportunities for collaborative learning, especially if you can draft in a few (eg) Y8s to train in advance as mentors;
• link with the content generator/HotPot games idea;
• perhaps encourage a few to join the open source Scratch community;
• Work well on the IWB, where the drag and drop approach to coding will look pretty cool; and
• even link with Moodle, where there's a filter which (after you update it to work with the latest version of Scratch) allows you to play the games or animations they create inside Moodle course forums etc.

Here's what our friends at OFSTED had to say about a not dissimilar primary/secondary liaison project using Scratch:

An urban primary school had good provision for developing pupils’ programming skills. Two Year 6 pupils attending provision for gifted and talented pupils at their local secondary school were introduced to a freeware application which enabled them to design and program a two- dimensional computer game. Their enthusiasm prompted their class teacher to download the software and to introduce a new unit of work for the whole class based around it.

Pupils were asked to design the graphics, layout and functionality of their own computer game and to write the program to implement their ideas for its design. Over a series of lessons, pupils used a ‘paint’ application to design their game backgrounds and sprites. Having completed the graphical elements, pupils wrote scripts to control movement and interaction in their games. This required them to learn to use sophisticated programming constructs such as ‘repeat... until’ and ‘if.then’ in capturing keyboard input, managing variables and testing whether particular conditions had been met.

The choice of task and software motivated pupils who were therefore able to make good progress. Most were able to write a series of executable instructions to implement the features of their game design. One autistic pupil excelled at this task and made better progress than his peers. He made outstanding use of loops, conditional jumps and incremental counters in his program. His skills exceeded those of his teacher, to whom he had to explain the principles of what he had done.

Be very interested to hear how it goes, as I'm sure would the folk over at scratched.mit.scratch.edu. By the way, your book is proving very popular with our 2nd Year Primary ICT Specialists; all 8 library copies on loan for what looks like the whole term, and requests that we order more :-)

It's a long time since I was ten years old, but in the interim I've raised a couple of ten year olds. My instincts are that open source would be distinctly dull. Scratch would be interesting, but at ten it is software and the terms of the licence would be of no interest. Is there some pressing need to explain open source in what I guess is a taster lesson for secondary education?

I would agree with most of the above suggestions. You might want to consider inkscape, paint.net, tux math. as possible ideas. The advantage of promoting open source in this context is that it costs parents and students nothing, so you could suggest that they download and use at home for homework/ extended work etc.

I used Scratch for a Year 6 taster session a couple of years ago. In a 1-hour lesson we covered some history through Celtic Knots (what they look like and where they can be found); Maths (simple topology - knots again); and ICT where they created a coloured bar sprite with contrasting blobs of colour on the ends. They programmed the sprite to move according to whatever arrow key was pressed (up=forward, left/right=turn), and told the sprite to leave a trail using the 'Stamp' command. This enabled them to draw (you guessed it) Celtic knots! Extension work involved making the sprite stop drawing when a particular key was pressed (so they could go under a previous line) and they made some lovely creations. One bright spark even made his sprite scale using a particular command key so the knot looked 3D! This technique spread round the class like wildfire...virally and without my intervention. They could have extended the activity themselves by making the sprite do different things. Some were puzzling out how to create an eraser mode, talking to each other to work the solution through.

Thing was, once they had 'got' it, I was redundant in the lesson. They made some lovely creations using, importantly, the tools they had created for themselves.

It would have been wonderful to have the opportunity to do some investigation work into classifying the knots that they had drawn, by counting crossings and looking at summing 'over' and 'under' crossings, or they might have tried to draw equivalent knots. The ICT lesson could have become a solid maths lesson.

At the end of the session the children (and this teacher) were buzzing and didn't want to go to the next session! Many promised to download Scratch themselves to 'play' at home (and they did - when I later visited some of the primary schools they took delight in coming and telling me)! I hope that helps, Mary.