School Closures: help for parents, teachers & kids
Due to the recent school closures, we're trying to provide a small bit of help to everyone. For parents and kids, all of our step by step coding projects are now free to use, and for teachers it's now free to enroll in our "Teaching Coding in Primary School" online course.
Teach coding in your school
We provide primary schools with an easy to use Coding Curriculum and Teacher Training for how to teach coding. Start coding in your school
Everything you need to start coding lessons in your school
Coding Curriculum
A curriculum to teach coding to primary school aged children that consists of lesson plans that introduce children to coding and brings them through more and more advanced topics.
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Step by step lessons
Each lesson comes with step by step instructions on how to create the project as well as notes and a completed solution for the teacher.
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Easy to use
Children can view an online version of each lesson using our super easy to use website lesson.ie or teachers can give lesson printouts to the them.
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Graded lessons
The coding curriculum is broken down from 1st to 6th class, is graded by difficulty and lessons are linked to the The Department of Education and Skills seven curriculum areas.
Teacher Training
We provide both online and workshop based teacher training that gives primary school teachers the knowledge and skills to teach coding as a subject.
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Online training
Take our online course to get a "Teaching Coding in Primary School" certificate from Coding Ireland.
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School workshops
We come to your school and run a two hour workshop that gives your teachers the necessary training and knowledge to start teaching coding.
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Equipment Info & Guides
All the lessons in the Coding Curriculum list the computer equipment that is required for the lesson and teachers can access handy guides that provide additional information about the equipment.
Want to know more?
Read on to find out more about our
Coding Curriculum and Teacher Training.
Educational & fun projects that your students will love
Each lesson is graded and lists the topics covered & duration. Here's a sample of some of the lessons in the Coding Curriculum.
Space Shooter
In this lesson we will control a spaceship with your mouse and shoot down balloons that randomly appear on the screen. We'll use variables to keep track of your score and how many lives you have left.
Guess the County
In this lesson we will create a game called "Guess the County". A map of Ireland with the counties outlined is displayed and players choose a county by dropping a pin on it. They then need to guess what the county is and the game records all their correct and incorrect answers.
Introduction to Coding
This lesson gives children in 4th, 5th or 6th Class, an introduction to coding and the fundamental concepts of computer programming.
This is a teacher led lesson. You should use a large screen display to show the video and then do the "Program the Teacher" exercise and group discussion with your class.
Higher or Lower
In this lesson we will create a "Higher or Lower" game where we'll use random numbers between 1 and 100 and guess if the next number will be higher or lower than the previous number.
Autonomous Car (part 2)
In part 2 of this lesson, we will add people that randomly walk around and we will program our autonomous car to detect and avoid them.
Note: You need to complete Autonomous Car (part 1) before you start this lesson.
Shopping List
In this lesson we create a shopping list and choose which items to add to it. Then when we're finished what's on the shopping list gets read back out.
Calculator
In this lesson we will create our own calculator and program it to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division sums. We'll also give the calculator it's own personality!
Autonomous Car (part 1)
In this lesson we will program a car to drive around a test track with no one driving it except a computer program!
Eye Colour Predictor
In this lesson we will create a program that predicts the colour of a child's eyes based on the eye colour of his/her parents. After choosing an eye colour for each parent, this program will tell you what are the percentage chances of the child having blue, brown or green eyes.
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Maze Game
In this game students program their character to navigate their way through a maze using the arrow keys on their keyboard.
Around the World
In this lesson we will do some math to calculate how long it would take to walk, drive or fly all the way around the world!
Note: the instructions for this project are for Scratch 2.0 but they should also work for Scratch 3.0.
Scratch Basics
This lesson introduces students to the Scratch programming language and the Scratch website that we use to create Scratch projects.
Note: In January 2019 Scratch 3.0 was released. This has an updated interface, additional sprites & backdrops and some additional functionality. The below video uses the older version of Scratch but will still give you a very good understanding of what it is and how it works.
Maze - Artificial Intelligence
In this lesson we will program a sprite to figure out how to navigate a maze using random decision making and we will time the beetle to see how fast it can complete the maze.
The Salmon of Knowledge
In this lesson we will create the Salmon of Knowledge story and use the 'message' blocks to time when the characters say their lines.
Make a Character
In this lesson we will make a program that allows us to create characters and dress them up in different clothes and accessories.
Internet Safety
This lesson teaches students about the internet, what's good about it and it's risks. It gives students some rules for being safe online.
This is a teacher led lesson. You should use a large screen display to show the video and continue on with the other steps of the lesson.
Microbit Basics
This lesson introduces students to Microbits and explains what the are and how to program them. At the end of the lesson students will create their first Microbit program and send it to their Microbit.
"An hour in the week that the children thoroughly enjoyed!"
Nicola O'Connor5th & 6th Class Teacher, Prosperous National School, Kildare
Start coding in your school
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Remote teaching for Irish schools
Coding Ireland have launched a remote teaching platform for Irish schools. Lesson.ie allows teachers to create lessons & assignments, send them to their students and work together online. Free Trial