For a more detailed break down of what topic is covered when, download our curriculum map.

Software
We are often asked by parents what software they could purchase for home, which could support their youngsters in school. We are often reluctant to recommend software, since some of the packages used in school are expensive and would not be used for a long enough period to justify an often significant outlay.

The school machines currently use Windows XP and MS Office 2010. It is obviously beneficial if students are able to use similar versions at home.

Internet Explorer is still the most commonly used browser, but certainly in ICT, we are making wider use of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Familiarity with at least two of these three browsers is beneficial. We feel it is important for students to be able to make choices about which software tools they use.

Image manipulation and multimedia software is often the most expensive, but there are a number of free packages which we would recommend for downloading at home.

Microsoft Movie Maker is a good, basic, movie editing package. This is free as part of Windows (there are different versions depending on which version of Windows you have - this is what we use in school)
Audacity is an excellent sound editing package which will be used for podcasting.
Scratch (which is taught in Year 7) is a free animation and programming tool
Game Maker 7 is used for Games Design in Year 8. The basic version is downloadable free of charge (we don't use the paid, Pro version) and we are currently teaching on version 7 not 8 (though they are very similar)

Resources
Most of the projects have developed using published schemes of work, purchased by the department. For Copyright reasons we are unable to make lesson resources available from the website at the moment. Sorry!

Designing and Playing Games!
Some parents are surprised that Game Design is a part of our Year 8 Curriculum. We believe that designing (and sometimes playing!) games can be an activity with a huge amount of educational merit. There are a huge number of underlying skills and disciplines required in games design, not to mention curriculum links to subjects like Maths, Science, Music and Art. Not convinced? You could read this interesting piece (sourced from Bradford LA). Perhaps most importantly of all it encourages creativity and enables us to approach aspects of our curriculum such as control and sequencing in what we hope is a motivating and enjoyable way. It also allows opportunities for students to plan and test, peer assesses and develop for an audience, skills which are valuable in many contexts.

We hope to showcase some of Finham Park's best game design talent on this part of the website, including games by the winners of the 2009-10 KS3 Game Design Competition!

In the meantime if you fancy having a go yourself, download GameMaker and try using these helpsheets and resources to get you started.