If you were unable to join us for Exploring Kita – A New Computing Workspace for Schools, our CAS Secondary online community meeting, don’t worry! You can catch up on the key content from the session below.

Exploring Kita: A New Computing Workspace for Schools

The CAS Secondary Community met online on 9 September 2026 to explore Kita, a workspace designed specifically for teaching and learning computing. The session introduced the thinking behind the platform, looked at its role in programming lessons and opened up a wider discussion about differentiation, inclusion and how digital tools can support — rather than complicate — classroom practice.

Key Takeaways

• Kita aims to bring programming, assessment, feedback and classroom management together within a single teaching environment.
• A key question for teachers is not simply what a platform can do, but whether it makes students’ progress easier to see and respond to during a lesson.
• Teachers raised the importance of differentiation and ensuring programming activities remain accessible to pupils with a wide range of prior attainment.
• The discussion around inclusion highlighted the value of co-design, accessible interfaces and reviewing whether the contexts used in computing tasks appeal to a broad range of learners.
• Kita is being developed iteratively with teacher feedback, including opportunities for educators to adapt or contribute teaching content.

Bringing computing tools together

One of the recurring challenges in teaching programming is the number of different systems that can become involved in a single lesson. Students might write code in one place, submit work somewhere else and receive feedback through another system, while the teacher moves between platforms to work out who is making progress and who needs support.

Kita is intended to reduce some of that fragmentation. The published outline for the session described a workspace bringing together coding, assessment, classroom management and AI-supported learning, with features aimed at giving teachers real-time visibility of pupils’ progress.

Heather Lyons introduced Kita by explaining its roots in practical computing education and the experience of the team behind it. She also referred to work with the University of Brighton and explained that the webinar would include an overview of the platform and the process of setting up a first class.

That raises a useful question beyond any individual product: how much of our lesson time is currently spent managing technology rather than teaching computing?

If a tool can reduce switching between systems, that may create more opportunities for teachers to concentrate on questioning, debugging, feedback and identifying misconceptions. Equally, consolidating everything into one platform is only useful if the resulting workflow remains straightforward for both teachers and pupils.

Differentiation needs to be part of the conversation

One of the most useful parts of the discussion came from a teacher asking about differentiation. The concern was that a computing platform needs to work not only for pupils who are already confident programmers, but also for those who require substantially more scaffolding.

This is particularly relevant in mixed-attainment computing classrooms. A programming task that appears straightforward to an experienced programmer can contain several simultaneous barriers for a novice: interpreting the problem, recalling syntax, understanding an error message, decomposing the problem and deciding what to try next.

During the discussion, the Kita team said they were open to working with teachers' existing lesson materials and exploring how those resources could be represented on the platform. Teachers were invited to share content that better reflected the range of learners they teach.

There is an interesting principle here whether or not we use Kita: rather than asking pupils to adapt to the structure of a particular tool, should we be asking how well the tool supports the pedagogy and resources we already know our pupils need?

Thinking about inclusion through design

Inclusion was another prominent theme towards the end of the meeting.

Heather explained that girls had been involved in pilot work and that girls' schools had also contributed to the co-design of the platform. Fiona MacNeill added that the team had considered issues such as gender-neutral language within its materials.

The discussion also touched on the design of programming challenges. Fiona described work on capture-the-flag activities developed with a group of girls, where a more story-based approach was used rather than relying primarily on mathematical-style challenges. She reported that this format had been received more positively by the girls involved in that particular design work. The team also discussed interface research that had informed work on a light-mode option.

These observations are perhaps most useful as prompts for further enquiry rather than universal rules about what particular groups of pupils prefer.

For teachers, the broader question is: who might be unintentionally excluded by the way we frame computing activities?

That could involve the visual design of the software pupils use, but it can also involve the contexts we choose for programming problems, the examples we use, the amount of prior knowledge we assume and the kinds of success we celebrate.

Trying different contexts and then gathering evidence from our own pupils may tell us far more than assuming that one style of task will suit a particular demographic.

Cost and practical classroom adoption

Teachers also asked a very practical question: how many pupils can actually use the platform?

During the meeting, Heather described a free teacher allowance of 30 students and discussed a paid option beyond that point.

As pricing and product plans can change, schools considering adoption should check Kita's current pricing information rather than relying on figures quoted during the webinar. At the time of writing, Kita's website lists a launch-offer teacher account for up to 30 students, alongside paid options for larger groups and multiple teachers.

This may sound like an administrative detail, but it is an important part of evaluating classroom technology. A platform might work effectively in a demonstration or with one class, yet the practical questions only become apparent when it is used across a full timetable.

How easily can classes be created? Can existing resources be transferred? How many pupils and teachers can use it? What happens when students change classes? How manageable is it across an entire department?

These questions deserve as much attention as individual features.

Development with teachers rather than around them

One message that came through strongly in the discussion was that Kita is still being developed in conversation with educators.

Heather encouraged teachers to share lesson plans and other materials so the team could explore how they might work within Kita. Fiona similarly described the platform's inclusion work as being at an early stage, rather than presenting the design as finished.
Kita's current website continues this emphasis, describing the platform as being designed with teachers and focusing on real-time feedback, visibility of pupil progress and teacher-controlled use of AI.

For classroom teachers, this is another useful point for reflection. When we trial new technology, we do not have to treat ourselves simply as consumers. Our classroom experience gives us evidence that developers do not necessarily have.

What works? What creates additional workload? Which pupils struggle? What information do we actually need while circulating around a programming lesson?

Sharing that evidence can help shape better tools.

Next Steps

The session provides several useful starting points for reflecting on our own programming lessons.

You might ask yourself:

• Where does friction currently occur in my programming lessons? Are pupils losing time signing in, moving between tools, submitting work or trying to find feedback?
• How quickly can I identify who needs help? Do I normally discover misconceptions while pupils are working, or only after looking at submitted work?
• Does differentiation change the thinking required, or simply provide better access to the same thinking?
• Are my programming tasks varied enough in their contexts? Could storytelling, games, data, creative projects, physical computing or real-world problems engage different pupils?
• Have I asked pupils which aspects of our programming environment make learning easier or harder?
• If pupils use AI support, what should it help them to do? Does it encourage debugging and explanation, or remove the thinking that we want pupils to practise?

Further Resources

CAS Secondary Community

Kita