The children's thoughts

“My favourite part is making the pattern. One, we didn't have to do lessons, and two because it was just fun.” 

“I liked it was not as normal lessons, that we normally do it was more about computing and coding and I like coding. I’d like to be a computing teacher. I like computing and I want to be a teacher.” 

“It was difficult trying to make a design and meet the stitch requirements, and cope with a density warning – when you have too many stitches in an area.” 

Teachers' reflections

We took part in this project in 2021, just after the children came back in September, and they were very excited to do some programming. Much of our coding curriculum is around making games and similar things, without a real-world output at the end, so it was really good to be involved in this project. 

We have done various City of Culture events, and collaborated with Warwick University on other projects, but this coding project was really special. We know our children don’t always get the opportunities to code with real life coders, and to use the technology, so having the opportunity to use the technology at the university was invaluable. Seeing the machine being used showed the children that what they do at school has a strong link to what they can do when they grow up.  

The children’s computing knowledge was developed and their problem-solving skills improved. Their design needed to be the right size to fit our brief, and solving problems themselves to meet the requirements built their resilience. They knew they had to get to the end and they knew there was something to be produced in real life. 

“As primary school teachers we don’t have significant training in how to teach coding; for lots of us its quite a scary thing to teach. Having the planning done for us and having the Turtlestitch readily available really helped us to feel confident with delivering the project...I had never used Turtlestitch before, so it was an opportunity to learn some more about the wider coding curriculum, the [training] videos were fantastic at helping me to learn the new steps of the block code that we hadn’t done before. Having the opportunity to learn about spiral patterns, that is knowledge I can use again when I’m teaching KS2 next year.” - Ms Stuart, teacher