There’s nothing new under the sun, and this is an old idea that went down incredibly well: generating random stories and poems by picking random words from word banks. I am grateful for my former colleague Cassie Wise for suggesting I do this for an interview lesson, which jogged my mind about Seymour Papert’s example in Mindstorms – which I translated into Python last summer:
Anyway, here are two cross-curricular English/Computing activities which would suit KS2 or KS3. I did the poetry in year 6 and the stories in year 5 and they were very engaging indeed. The computing concepts are simple but include random choices, list data structures, sequencing and possible concatenation of strings.
Robot Poetry
Robot storytelling
If you use these resources or have done something similar, I would love to hear your ideas and experiences.