West Hoathly Church of England Primary School

There is a lot of related terminology that you may or may not be familiar with, so I just wanted to add a Glossary written in a child friendly way.   In school, the children will be introduced to these terms over the course of their time with us.

• Abstraction – Focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant detail.
• Algorithm – Step by Step computer instructions solving a problem.
• Bug – Coding errors.  These are problems with the running of a program, or errors that mean it doesn’t run at all.
• Coding - Computers can’t think for themselves, so we help them by writing instructions for them - This is called coding.
• Computational Thinking – Described to the children as learning to think scientifically, like a computer programmer.
• Conditional - A set of rules performed if a certain condition is met, i.e. If the tile is green, turn left but if tile is red, turn right.
• Debug – Find and fix mistakes in a computer program.
• Decomposition - Breaking a problem down into smaller parts to make it easier to tackle.
• Loops - A sequence of instructions that is continually repeated until a certain condition is reached.
• Operators - IF the tile is Green OR the tile is Blue THEN . . .
• Pattern Recognition – Looking for similarities among and within problems.
• Procedure - A piece of code that can be run multiple times.
• Program – A list of instructions that tells a computer exactly what to do.
• Recursion - The repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition
• Repetition – Doing the same instruction more than once.
• Selection – A choice a program has to make based on specific factors.
• Sequence – Instructions that need to be followed in order.
• Syntax – The way coding should be arranged and the words used.
• Variable – Part of a computer program that allows for changeable data, i.e. Variables could be used to store the score in a game, the number of cars in a car park or the cost of items on a till.

I understand that using terminology you are unfamiliar with can be daunting.  When I am working on programming with the younger children, I focus on Bugs, Debugging, Pattern Recognition and Decomposition, in order to make algorithms more efficient.