St Mary’s College is now a Digital Schoolhouse


Saint Mary’s College has been selected to take part in an award-winning national programme, Digital School House, powered by PlayStation®. This exciting programme offers support to teachers in delivering the computing curriculum. Saint Mary’s College is the Digital Schoolhouse hub for the Northwest and we are inviting all of the local primary schools to come along for a free computing training and computational thinking workshop.

This innovative and exciting new programme will take place every Monday. Primary Schools can book a fun and informative training workshop. Throughout the session they will learn about various elements of computing through play-based learning techniques.

Mrs Rice explains what primary schools attending the training day can expect to learn: “The workshops are filled with fun, unplugged activities that develop pupils’ higher order thinking skills and creativity. They really make computing seem effortless and made coding fun.”

“For one part of the session, we plan on teaching programming through various activities including dance! The activities will highlight the importance of precision and logic in sequencing instructions. Key computational thinking skills such as algorithmic thinking, abstraction and decomposition are also covered here – but in a fun, creative and hands-on way! We want teachers and pupils to leave us with a sense of having gained some really useful computing skills, and more importantly, skills they can implement when they’re back in their classrooms.”

The Digital Schoolhouse programme is delivered by the UK games industry trade body Ukie. The programme was originally funded by the Mayor of London’s London Schools Excellence Fund (LSEF). The programme is powered by PlayStation® and sponsored by Sega, Ubisoft and Warwickshire Council. The programme is now UK wide with St Mary’s College being one of only five schools in Northern Ireland and the only one in the Northwest to become a Digital Schoolhouse hub.

Schools interested in finding more about the training and how they benefit from it should contact Mrs Rice at rrice226@stmarys.derry.ni.sch.uk, or those wanting to register their attendance should visit https://stmarys.roombookingsystem.co.uk/. Login details will be provided on request. For more information about the Digital Schoolhouse programme, please visit www.digitalschoolhouse.org.uk

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