Year 8 learn about computer programs by becoming the computers

How do our Year 8 Computer Science students learn about how computers run programs?

Answer: By deconstructing a computer into its constituent parts on paper and giving each student their own role to perform - effectively making a table of four come together as one functioning, breathing computer!

With Ellie Woodward as the control unit, Tomke G. functioning as the arithmetic and logic unit, Evie B-E. as the registers and Izzy F. running the main memory, their table was very successfully operating fetch-decode-execute cycles.

This was a hands-on display of how a computer repeats the same cycle over and over again, for every instruction of every program, and while real computers may be a bit quieter that our real-life ones, it was a fun and highly logical way of putting into practice what they had learned in their previous lessons.