The lab hour
The computer period you already timetable, with something in it worth doing.
Who this suits. Branches teaching the Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence elective in classes 8 to 12.
- Could start
- Next term, once one of your teachers has run the pilot
- What it asks of the school
- Moderate
How it runs
The whole class builds in the period you already have. Each exercise is small enough to finish before the bell: describe an app in plain words, watch it get built, put it in front of somebody, change the thing they complained about.
Students work in small groups rather than one app each. Four to an app is better teaching than thirty children building thirty copies of the same list of homework, and it costs the school a quarter as much.
The school holds one shared building budget for the year, sized to the number of periods you will actually teach rather than to the number of children on the roll.
What each side puts in
The school provides
- The lab period already on the timetable
- A teacher to run the room — no programming required of them
- One budget line for the year
The school gets
- A lab hour that ends with working software instead of a diagram of working software
- An activity shaped like the elective you are already examined on
- Spending that follows the periods you teach, not the heads on the register
The students get
- Several finished apps across a year, each one live and each one theirs
- Practice at saying exactly what they want — the skill underneath all of this
- Work they can hand to a person and watch them use
How it is paid for
The school buys one shared pool of building budget and the class draws from it through the year. It stretches furthest when exercises are short and shared between a few students, which is also how we would teach it.
There is no price on this page, and that is on purpose. What this costs to run depends on how it is taught — short exercises shared between a few students cost a fraction of what long solo projects cost — and we would rather measure that in your school than quote a number we cannot stand behind. Whatever follows a pilot is agreed in writing before the pilot begins.
The catch
There is no per-student spending limit yet. One determined child can use more of the shared pool in an afternoon than the class uses in a month. Until we have built that limit we watch the pool for you and warn you well before it matters — workable for one school, and exactly why we want to do one branch before twenty.
Every model on the main page carries one of these, and the same page lists what we have not built yet. Everything we have not finished across the whole product is on our trust page.
Start with one class, one term, free.
Whichever model you end up running, the first step is the same: one branch, one teacher, one term, at no cost.
Talk to us about a pilot