This Python Next Steps teacher’s guide contains detailed lesson plans to accompany the five sets of PowerPoint slides and worksheets.

The lessons are designed to form a strong base for ideas for the teacher. They should be adapted to suit the teaching style and preferences of the individual teacher, and the resources and nature of the individual school or Computing / ICT department.

The material supplied for this unit includes:

• 6 PowerPoint presentations, each designed to cover one lesson
• 8 worksheets, many with example responses
• 5 homework sheets
• An end-of-unit learning portfolio for assessment purposes

This unit assumes that students already have some experience with Python or a similar language. The first lesson has a series of tasks designed to revisit the basic skills already covered. Students then use for loops and compare their use with while loops, before moving on to arrays (lists), which are introduced as a new data structure and are used in conjunction with for loops. Functions with and without parameters are covered to help students understand the concept and benefits of modular programming.

At the end of this Unit, all students should be able to:

• Use data types correctly and convert between them when necessary
• Write programs that use a loop to repeat a section of code
• Write programs that use lists (known as ‘arrays’ in some languages)
• Create and use a function with or without parameters
• Find and debug syntax errors
• Look at a given section of code and describe its function.