Introducing our new curriculum content developer Estelle

As one of the latest appointments to the Digital Schoolhouse team as Curriculum Content Developer, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself and explain a little of what attracted me to the position. As an experienced teacher, I have come to love creating innovative Computer Science resources and have grown increasingly frustrated that I am not always able to develop them to the standard I would like. When I saw the job advertised I was excited, as it would mean that I could focus on where my expertise lie while still drawing on the experience of classroom teaching for part of the week.

I grew up on the sunny Sussex coast in Eastbourne and went to Brighton University where I studied Music Production at degree level and then worked in radio production for a couple of local commercial stations. Alongside this, I was involved in several youth projects and found that I enjoyed working with children and young people and this led me to pursue a career in teaching. Initially I thought I wanted to teach Music and took on a cover supervisor role at a local secondary school in order to get experience, I quickly found that it was ICT that inspired me and so my teaching journey began. Over the last 10 years, I have made the move from teaching ICT to teaching Computing and have enjoyed every minute of it. Especially the challenge of becoming a self-taught programmer!

I have taught in a boys comprehensive school in Hastings where I learnt that feedback needs to be timely and as close to instant as possible and this led me to my interest in the use of games in the classroom, eventually leading to my Masters dissertation which explored the use of the Channel 4 game Privates to teach PSHE. This led me to begin to develop a gamified curriculum which has inspired me ever since.

I am known within our teacher’s network for the quality of my resources and have developed several workshops with Digital Schoolhouse over the last few years. I look forward to getting started!

You can follow me on Twitter @CompSci_Geek and contact me at estelle@ukie.org.uk.