Education Today Education Today Magazine
Last month Sherston Software announced that they were moving to a freemium business model for their online digital world for primary schools, Planet Sherston. The term “freemium” is a word of two halves – ‘free’ and ‘premium’ and is a business model used by many popular services such as LinkedIn, Dropbox and Skype. The team at Planet Sherston have seen a 25% increase in the number of schools using their service since the re-launch in October.
Schools have no obligation to use anything other than the free service, but there are a range of high quality premium services that can be added from as little as £100. One of these is the brand new Rainforest Coding add-on – a new collection of adventures and activities designed to make Scratch programming easier to understand and fun to learn.
Rainforest Coding was created by Simon Hosler, the author of the Crystal Rainforest, which since its release has sold more than 20,000 copies. Simon has been developing award-winning content for schools and nurseries for over thirty years.
Commenting on his new software, Simon says,
“I wanted to follow on from the success of Crystal Rainforest and create an adventure-based resource to introduce scratch for beginners. The ten activity challenges gradually introduce new coding techniques in a logical and sequential manner, without any previous knowledge required.”
Rainforest Coding can be purchased as one of the premium modules when you sign up for the free service, Planet Sherston.
