Day 1
01 Workshop Opener 02 Recruiting Students 03 Stretch 04 Unit 5 Conclusions and Connections 05 Unit 6 Overview 06 Wrap Up

Session 4: Unit 5 Conclusions and Connections

20 minutes

lesson exploration

Purpose

The purpose of this session is to look at the big picture of Unit 5. To do this, participants look at the end of the unit project which shows participants what students should know and be able to do by the end of Unit 5. We also want to take this opportunity to start talking about scoping projects. Eventually, we want students to do this themselves, but teachers also need to have this skill to support students.

Objectives

  • Participants understand how Unit 5 connects to future units in the curriculum.
  • Participants have strategies for extending projects for students who are looking for an extra challenge.
  • Participants are able to identify potential trouble points in student project ideas (ex. projects that are too expansive) and support students in defining a minimal viable product.

Supplies & Prep

Workshop Modality:

  • Whole group
  • Breakout rooms

Facilitator Supplies:

Teacher Materials:

  • None

Agenda

Context of Unit 5 (3 minutes)

Explore the Hackathon Task (17 minutes)

Facilitation Guide

Context of Unit 5 (3 minutes)

Use your slides to guide your review of Unit 5. Remind participants that they looked at much of Unit 5 in the asynchronous work and anticipated student responses to lessons. This is intended to remind them of what Unit 5 looks like at a high level.

(2 minutes) 💷 During Unit 5

Use the slides to guide your description of Unit 5, including the following information:

  • This is the second programming unit that uses EIPM that students will experience.
  • There are 3 EIPM sequences in Unit 5: one on Lists, one on Loops, and one on Traversals.
  • At the end of the unit, students engage in a “Hackathon project”

(1 minute) 💷 After Unit 5

After Unit 5, we take a short break from programming with Unit 6 on algorithms. This is an unplugged unit. While students can find programming both creative and challenging, the process can get repetitive. Unit 6 allows for students to think and collaborate in different ways before returning to the final programming unit.

Explore the Hackathon Task (17 minutes)

Producer support: Prepare to put participants in groups of 4 in breakout rooms for 5 minutes.

(2 minutes) Describe the Hackathon at a high level

Remarks

To understand what students will be learning throughout this unit, let’s look at the project-based assessment for this unit.

💷 Use the slide to guide your overview:

  • The Hackathon project should fall at the end of your semester.
  • It is broken into 5 different days.
  • This is written as a partner project where one person is the designer and the other person is the programmer.
  • The project involves planning and creating an app as well as writing responses to some strategic prompts.

(5 minutes) Introduce and Complete the Task

We recommend putting participants in groups of 3-4 in order allow them to talk though this task with people as needed.

💷 Do this:

  • Open and read the Project Planning Guide for the Hackathon Project.
  • Review one of the example apps and written responses found found in the teacher links sections of Lesson 17.
    • Test out the app and read the corresponding response
    • Identify where and how these apps meet the requirements for the project as described in the planning guide.
  • Imagine you have a group of students who created the example app you see here but still has extra time in class. What are 1-2 small ways you might suggest that they could incrementally build on this project?

Producer support: Put participants in groups of 4 for 5 minutes in breakout rooms.

(9 minutes) 💷 Share Out

Remarks

Some students will struggle with understanding the right scope of this project at hand. Specifically, some students will try to go way beyond the scope of the project. Sometimes, you might be ok with allowing students to try something that feels unattainable because it can still be a learning experience. To manage this situation, you can help students scope out their project in small, manageable steps.

💷 Have participants review the example in the slides about two students who are planning to make the following project for the Hackathon:

  1. Our project will generate a birthday fact sheet for a user. On an opening screen a user will enter their name and birthday, including a year.

  2. When they hit “Go” they will see a screen that shows them information about their birth year and date.

    • For the birth year, they will see: Who was president that year AND who won best actor or actress at the Oscars that year.
    • For their birth date they will see if any Nobel prize winners share their same birthdate. This will include the Nobel prize winner’s name, the category and year they won the award.

  3. From there, users can hit the “next” button. This will show a user a list of famous people who share their first name. This will include names of congressional members, supreme court justices, and Oscar winners. If no one shares the same name as the user, it will say “Maybe you will be the first person with the name {insert name here] to be in congress, the supreme court, or win an Oscar!” There will be a button to go back to the home screen.

Facilitator Tip

There are multiple “first step” options here. The purpose of this task is to help participants consider ways they can help students refine their projects. For example, one first step might be to have participants only enter a year and then get information about who was president that year. This would reduce the complexity of entering a birthday and name and also adding multiple lists. A second step might be to add a second piece of information to that “year” screen. Alternatively, students could have users enter a first name into the app and check for oscar winners who share their name. A second step might be to have the app also show why that individual won the oscar.

Remarks

This is likely to be a bit over-ambitious for the students. This doesn’t mean they need to come up with a new idea, it just means we need to help them scope or scale back their project. One way to do that is to help them imagine what the smaller steps look like to getting to the larger project.

(5 minutes) 💷 Discussion prompt: What is a possible “first step” in the proposed project that is still attainable? What would a second step be? How could you scale this back?

(1 minute) Wrap Up

Remarks

💷 Supporting learning during a project requires you as the teacher to push students when they need to be pushed - such as helping them brainstorm extensions, but also helping students plan their projects in incremental phases so that they do not try to take on too large of a task. Helping students develop these skills now - the skill to be able to build up and scale back a project - will help them be successful in future projects such as the Create Performance Task.