Touch Develop – Scheme Of Work

With I.C.T in the U.K changing, I have been looking at other ways of offering Computer Science in my lessons. I have been programming bits here and there and I have been using Kodu with my students. I wanted to step things up a notch and get my students understanding functions. I also wanted to start introducing arrays and if statements into their vocabulary. I was fortunate enough to start learning about the Touch Develop platform.

To see how each of the lessons map into the new national curriculum, you can follow the links on the image above. Each of the links will take you to the video you need. Alternatively, you can click on the links below in order to go through the scheme of work lesson by lesson.

TouchDevelop is a programming environment that runs on your mobile devices. You write scripts by tapping on the screen. You do not need a separate PC or keyboard. Scripts can perform various tasks similar to regular apps. Any TouchDevelop user can install, run, edit, and publish scripts. You can share your scripts with other people by publishing them to the TouchDevelop script bazaar, or by submitting them as an app to the Windows Store or Windows Phone Store.

I have started developing a scheme of work which will allow students to break into it slowly. The first lesson starts off by introducing them to variables, backgrounds and sprites. They will be able to add a character into their game and they will be able to use variables to change the height and width of characters. I have attached some PDF’s to support and the videos on this page will support the learning. The materials are free to download and let me know if they have been useful.

Lesson 1 – This lesson introduces the basics and shows the environment to students. This lesson should get students creating a background and a character using variables.	Click on the resource above for a walk through on creating and setting up the background on program. * Updated	Click on the resource above for a walk through on creating your own characters / sprites within a game or application. * Updated
Lesson 2 – This lesson introduces the game loop event. This tests for interactions over and over to see what is happening. Lessons are taught about IF statements and how to update text.	Learn how to add the game loop event. This tests for what is happening (all the time). Think of this as a traffic light sensor which is always looking for what is happening next. *Updated	Learn how to create text as part of your game. You also learn how to set the text on the text. *Updated	This activity will allow your students to put things in the correct order in the correct table. Cut out the tiles and mix them up. Your students should be able to re-arrange this into the correct order. *Updated
Lesson 3 – This lesson introduces the basics of functions and procedures and shows students how they can update their existing code to be a procedure.	Learn how to use some of your existing code and how to change to insert procedures. *Updated	Learn how to set up a function which uses input and output perimeters. Majority of this covered in the update	Learn how to use the function you set up in the previous walk through. Majority of this covered in the update
Lesson 4 – How to move characters across the screens without input from the user.	Here is a quick pop quiz to test what your students have marked so far. Most of the questions ask them to explain the knowledge they’ve gained so that you can judge their answers.	Here is a quick guide to changing the X and Y variables of sprites so that they can move on their own. You might like flying objects in a game and this introduces it to students.
Lesson 5 – Users plan and develop a program which will benefit their school. They must design screen shots of their game and talk about how they plan on meeting the requirements.	Attached is a proposal which was made for an Appathon competition by me. You can see some of the screen designs. Students can do this task in PowerPoint or on paper. It is something they can use as an idea.	Requirements sheet. Students must write out how they plan on meeting the client needs in order to achieve marks for planning. The next lesson will focus on pseudo code.
Lesson 6 – Users plan and develop a program which will benefit their school. They’re required to use Pseudo code during this lesson. They need to think about the code and understand the importance of writing a structure of code before making it.	Pseudo Code activity sheet 1 – Get students to write some structured English to help them understand coding.	Pseudo Code activity sheet 2 – Get students to underline variables which might be used within Pseudo code.
Lesson 7 – This lesson allows the students to start building their application. The video tutorials are embedded and it is a large file. Alternatively you can watch the video from the tutorials attached.
Lesson 8 – This lesson introduces the final stages of development to students and talks to them about the importance of testing. There are examples of test plans in the slides for you to try with students.

Here are a few Bonus Lessons to support different aspects of the new national curriculum.

Lesson	Resource 1	Resource 2	Resource 3
Lesson on Algorithms	Resource which show you how to make a cup of tea using algorithms	Instructions for Resource 1 on making a cup of tea.	Students are required to make their own algorithm using this task.
Lesson on Data Types
Lesson on Logic and Logic Gates	Logic Gates work sheet to support task.	Logic Gates work sheet answers for previous task.