What you have seen in Unit 1 (2 minutes)

Use the slides to point out what participants saw during this unit.

• Unit 1 has been about representing information digitally
• Out of the 14 lessons, participants saw 5 of the lessons as a learner or teacher
• Out of the 14 lessons, we also saw content from two of the lessons in an “Extended Previously On…” format: Binary Numbers and Color Images.
• We are going to spend the rest of the time looking at a high level at the lessons we didn’t see from Unit 1 to help participants get a better understanding of the unit story.

What we have not seen - Lesson Overviews (22 minutes)

(5 minutes) U1L5 - Overflow and Rounding

• Description: This lesson builds student understanding of the binary number system by exploring errors that result from overflow and rounding.

• Learning Goal:

  • Students will understand that overflow and roundoff errors result from real-world limitations in representing place value.
    
    

• Tool:

  • Odometer widget
    
    

• Key beats of the lesson:

  • Warm-up: Introduces the idea of what happens when you don’t have the right “places” to store information.
    • Facilitator prompt to group: “Imagine you work at a local store. In the register all you have are nine $10 bills, nine $1 bills, and nine dimes.” What is the largest/smallest amount you could give someone in change?
  • Activity:
    • Students explore the Odometer widget (which we saw on Monday) to see what happens when there aren’t enough places to store large numbers. This is when overflow happens.
    • Then we introduce the opposite problem: we don’t have enough spaces to get small values. To examine this problem, learners will need to come up with their own system for dealing with the limitations of the Flippy Do when representing fractional amounts.
    • Learners examine a candy shop scenario to discuss the pros and cons of different systems for dealing with this limitation.
      • Facilitator prompt to group: How might you represent fractional amounts in binary?
      • Facilitator prompt to group: What if I wanted to represent .39 in binary? I couldn’t do it because we don’t have the right spaces. How would you round .39 with the given amount of bits you have?
  • Wrap-up: Learners synthesize the activity and add Overflow Error and Round-off Error as vocabulary to their notebooks.
    
    

(5 minutes) U1L6 - Representing Text

This lesson follows Lesson 5.

• Description: Students create a system for representing text using only numbers while communicating with each other. They are only allowed to send numbers back-and-forth, so they must create a system to translate between number and character. This marks a transition from talking about computers representing numbers and computers representing more complex information digitally.

• Learning Goals:

  • Students will be able to develop a system for using numbers to represent text.
  • Students will be able to explain how bits are grouped to represent abstractions like numbers and text.
  • Students will be able to describe the challenges in representing text when using a fixed number of bits for each character.
    
    

• Key beats of the lesson:

  • Warm-up: Show students a set of numbers that they need to interpret. This primes students for thinking about numbers as representing other information.
  • Activity:
    • Students work in pairs to communicate to one another text messages but only with using numbers. Students develop a system and the teacher provides four different challenges to test the system. One student will “send” the message by passing a note with only numbers on it to their partner who will need to interpret the message based on the rules the two of them agreed upon. Challenges include sending messages with spaces, punctuation, capitalization and numbers (ex. “C ya 2night!”)
    • After the four challenges students learn about the system computers used called ASCII to communicate through text.
      • Open up the ASCII one-pager (link)[https://docs.google.com/document/d/15pgXcGUX7XbAAGBkHfXMMLFwDP5cTKKZ-zFIfFKu9FQ/edit] for the group to look at.
    • Students compare their system to the ASCII system.
  • Wrap-up: Students learn the vocabulary word “abstraction” which is when we create simplified representations of something more complex. This lets us hide the details and instead focus on problems at a higher level.
    
    

• Where this is going:

  • Following this lesson is the Black and White Images lesson you saw today. This lesson prepares students for the Black and White Images lesson by transitioning away from numbers and to other types of digital information (in this case, text).

(2 minutes) Context Reminder

Use the slides to pause to remind the group of the lessons they saw between Lesson 6 (Representing Text) and Lesson 11 (Intellectual Property). The story continues to move to representing images digitally in lessons 7-8 and then how we manage the number of bits used to represent this information in compression in lessons 9-10.

(6 minutes) U1L11 - Intellectual Property

This lesson follows the last lesson you saw today on Lossy Compression

• Description: This lesson is also a scaffold to the larger project that begins after this lesson which includes several tasks that are also a part of this lesson such as, annotating an article, answering questions, and forming an opinion using the article as evidence.

• Learning Goals:

  • Students will be able to explain how copyright and Creative Commons Licenses can be applied to digital works of creativity
  • Students will be able to argue if current copyright laws are helping or harming society using evidence from an article
    
    

• Key beats of the lesson:

  • Warm-up: Students consider the desire to “get credit” for digital works they create and what questions this raises about who “owns” digital work.
  • Activity:
    • Students read an article about stalking dance moves for Fortnite
    • Students watch 3 short videos about Copyright and Creative Commons
    • Students re-read their article with this new knowledge in mind and answer specific questions about benefits and harms mentioned in the article.
  • Wrap-up: Students use quotes from the article to justify an opinion about the benefit or harms of copyright.
    
    

• Where this is going: Students use the skill of justifying opinions in the project at the end of the unit.

(3 minutes) U1L12 and 13 - Digital Information Dilemmas (Parts 1 and 2)

• Overview: These two lessons contain a project which ask students to consider additional impacts of digitization of information beyond intellectual property as discussed in the prior lesson. By the end of the two days students have made a “Position Poster” that synthesizes their thinking.

• Key points:

  • On the first day, students are asked the question “Does digitizing our world make our world better or worse?”
  • Students read an article and analyze the information presented in the article.
  • On the second day, students identify benefits and harms from digitizing information based on the article. Students document their thinking on a Position Poster.
  • The second day ends with doing a “Jigsaw” activity as students share their Position Posters with one another and the whole class engages in a discussion about the original question posed “Does digitizing our world make our world better or worse?” to determine if what they learned has changed their original position.

Connections to Unit 2 (1 minute)